Sixth District Congressman Ben Cline, predictably, because he’s hard-core MAGA, isn’t interested in the oversight part of his job on the matter of the Sept. 2 double-tap missile strike that killed two survivors of a legally dubious first missile strike targeting their boat in international waters off the coast of Venezuela.
“I’m confident that we are following the Constitution and the letter of the law as we target these drug runners, and so, I’m going to continue to get this intelligence and continue to make sure that we do that as we target the source of this cause of death for so many families here in the Roanoke Valley,” said Cline, in an interview with WFIR in Roanoke last week.
ICYMI
- Hegseth under fire for what appears to be a war crimes situation
- Hegseth blames second missile strike on ‘fog of war,’ digging hole deeper
Seems that you could justify pretty much anything by hiding behind targeting “drug runners,” who, it needs to be said, don’t have friends dropping coin in the pockets of the POTUS, to buy their way into getting their product into the hands of consumers here in the States.
More on that in a hot minute.
Getting this back to the talking points from our guy, Ben Cline, how many drug-overdose deaths do you think there were, say, last year, 2024, across the Commonwealth?
When you hear Donald Trump talking about how knocking off a single alleged drug-running boat off the coast of Venezuela saving 25,000 lives, you’d assume a lot, right?
Not to diminish the value of a single human life lost to anything, but: 1,403 Virginians died of drug overdoses in 2024, per data from the Virginia Department of Health.
And fortunately, that number was down 46.5 percent from 2021, the year that Joe Biden took over the Oval Office.
Cline focused his answer to the Roanoke Valley audience because he was talking to a Roanoke radio station, but looking aty drug-overdose deaths across the Sixth District in 2024 (again, numbers from VDH):
- Roanoke County/Roanoke/Salem: 81 deaths
- Augusta County/Staunton/Waynesboro: 17 deaths
- Shenandoah County: 10 deaths
- Rockingham County/Harrisonburg: 9 deaths
- Warren County: 9 deaths
- Botetourt County: 6 deaths
- Rockbridge County/Lexington/Buena Vista: 5 deaths
- Frederick County/Winchester: 4 deaths
- Alleghany County: 3 deaths
- Page County: 2 deaths
- Clarke County: 1 death
- Bath County/Highland County: 0 deaths
Total for 2024 in the Sixth District: 147 drug-overdose deaths.
Per the VDH data, 68.6 percent of the deaths involved fentanyl, which comes not from drug boats originating in Venezuela, but drug cartels in Mexico.
Back of the envelope math time: less than one in three of the overdose deaths in the Sixth District would have involved the use of cocaine, which is the product of choice of the drug runners coming our way from the northern tip of South America.
So, roughly 50 people – which is less than the number of people targeted and killed by the Trump DoD in the drug strikes that began three months ago, without a declaration of war, without any criminal indictments, without even basic identification to ascertain that the people on the boats are who we say they are.
“Drugs are a huge problem in this country, and there’s so many families in our district have been affected by drug abuse, and we need to tackle it at the source, and the source is South America, Central America, where the drugs are grown and made and brought up,” Cline told WFIR, signaling to us that, he has no idea what he’s talking about.
It’s fentanyl, dude, that is the problem.
“By targeting drug runners, which is what our president has done effectively, is a way to stop the drugs from hurting families here in the district. So, I commend the president for going to the source and trying to target these drug runners, these narcoterrorists, which they are, the cartels are targeting innocent American civilians. And these are agents of these drug cartels. And so, I trust our intelligence,” Cline said.
The interviewer, unfortunately, didn’t ask Cline what he thought of Trump’s decision from last month to pardon the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, was convicted in the U.S. in 2024 for conspiring to traffic more than 400 tons of cocaine and weapons charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison.
ICYMI
Hernández served as president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022, his rise in politics funded by, ahem, yep, you guessed it, narcoterrorists.
According to the Department of Justice, Hernández was at the center of one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world dating to his early years in Honduran Congress.
His election wins in 2013 and 2017 were marred by scandal, but Trump recognized Hernández as the winner in his re-election effort in 2017 despite widespread allegations of fraud; Hernández was losing the election until election authorities stopped releasing results and ultimately declared that he won another term.
Hernández, clearly, a big fan of the U.S. – during his trial, it was revealed that he’d said he wanted to shove drugs “right up the noses of the gringos” by flooding the United States with cocaine.
Trump wrote on his socials that Hernández was, “according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly.”
You know, because he’s a rich guy – his riches coming from running drugs.
The poor schlubs on a boat with a 150-mile range that we’re led to believe are trying to traverse 1,500 miles of international waters to get to the southern tip of the U.S. that we’re blasting out of the water aren’t being treated “harshly and unfairly.”
It would appear that our congressman is running interference for the fatcats who actually are making gobs of money from drug running.
That’s all those missile strikes are: eye candy.
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Chris Graham
