What if the Shoe Was on the Other Foot?  Food for Thought (Transcript)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S 7:11 AM SPECIAL BROADCAST: What if the Shoe Was on the Other Foot?  Food for Thought:

Hi, Bob Barney with The Plain Truth today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com, and I
sometimes like to play devil’s advocate and just bring up what-if scenarios and have people, if
they’re honest with themselves, answer the questions honestly. I know a lot of people don’t like
to be honest with themselves when it comes to maybe questioning why they do the things that
they do or believe the things that they believe. You know, the other day I had one on Christmas,
would you want to put Christ back in Christmas where he belongs, as you claim, and then
would you be willing to get rid of the Christmas tree, which has nothing to do with Christ, or
Santa Claus, or all of the gift-giving, or are you just looking for an excuse to do the others and
then put Christ in it to give you that excuse? That was one of the things.
But today we’re going to talk about the Maduro-Venezuela situation and some other situations
around the world, like Russia, Ukraine, and I’m going to ask what-if kind of questions. This is
not what I necessarily believe. This is not necessarily my point of view.
It’s what I like to do even with myself. Many times I ask myself what if the shoe was on the
other foot. For example, what right do we have to go to another country with a police action,
not a war, not a declared war like when we went after Adolf Hitler and people like that, but in a
police action, the FBI was involved, that you go to another head of state from another country,
kidnap that person in that country, then bring them to your country, and have a trial.
Is that legit? And if it is or not, I don’t know, and I don’t know if it should be legit. But then
again, what if the shoe was on the other foot? What would happen if a country was to decide to
capture one of our diplomats or maybe our president? You think that’s impossible? I’ll give you
a scenario in a minute where it’s not impossible. And what would be our reaction? And I’ll set
that up with a little knowledge that I have about Donald Trump and what he says about his
former rival in the 2020 election.
Donald Trump claims that Joe Biden was not elected. I agree with that, by the way. I think it was
a stolen election.
I think a lot of elections are stolen, but maybe they’re stolen fair and square, as Nixon said to
his advisors when he lost to Kennedy, when Kennedy didn’t win that election either. But the
question I have is, Donald Trump has made a public statement many times over that Joe Biden
was never elected president. It was a stolen election, and he actually won the presidency.
We had that whole January 6th showdown, which to this day, you have people on both sides,
some saying that Donald Trump should have been not only impeached but put in jail for
treason, insurrection. Other people on the other side say there is no such evidence of any such
thing. I’m on that side, by the way.

But if Joe Biden was not really the true elected president as Donald Trump has said, would that
give, for example, the European court or maybe China or Russia the ability to have kidnapped
Joe Biden and say that he is going to go on trial now in a foreign country because he is not
really elected. He’s president because he was part of a stolen election. What would the
American people think about that? What would the Republicans and Democrats think about
that? What would even anti-Biden people think about that? Would they be happy or would they
say that was an act of war? Here’s even another situation.
We have nations, Germany is one of them, Japan is another one. Most of Europe would fall into
this realm. We have many nations in the world that think the single biggest crisis that mankind
is facing is climate change.

Now, if you know what I think about that, you know that’s a bunch of baloney. But they believe
this with all their heart and they have literally put in policies that impoverish their people over
climate change rules and regulations. Germany, for example, it’s very hard to live in Germany
with all the regulations, especially if you’re a business, because they want everything green,
even if it doesn’t work.

But now they believe that whenever a country like America is not following the right climate
change policies, they are endangering the entire human race around the world, as well as all
life on this planet. And they think they have the right to dictate to America and to American
presidents what we should do in this country to protect the world from climate change. Now, if
they really believe that, and they believe this is scientifically accurate, and there is no way, no
how, that in 25 years we’re not all going to be dead, then do they not have the right to make an
armed force go to Washington and capture all of Washington, D.C., and hold Congress, the
Senate, Supreme Court, and the president hostage, forcing them to sign bills to outlaw vehicles
in America, outlaw gasoline, outlaw anything that they consider wrong? Would that be an act of
war? And I know this sounds preposterous, but you got to take things to the illogical conclusion
to focus in on what you think makes sense in the beginning, and then wonder, well, if I stretch
it way out and I put a big microscope, and when you really go to an illogical conclusion, what
you’re really doing is you’re putting a microscope and you’re turning it up to high resolution,
and you’re seeing the fallacy sometimes in our thinking.

Before we get back to this idea of what we arrested Maduro and we have him in a federal court,
and I’m going to get into that in a minute here, I’m going to change the subject before I get
back to that, into what would happen, for example, if a state, a United States state, decided that
it was no longer part of the Union, and the rest of the world agreed with that. Europe agreed
with it, China agreed with it, Soviet Union agreed with it, and they said they were their own
country. What would we do? Well, we already know what we would do.
Virginia did it, South Carolina, North Carolina did it, Texas did it, most of the confederate states
did it, and they made a state called the Confederate States of America. And I know Abraham
Lincoln, he’d said, well, they have a right to do it, we’re not going to stop them from
succeeding. No, no, the very first war criminal, according to the Geneva Convention, was none
other than Abraham Lincoln.

Why? Because he waged total war on the civilians of the South. Does that sound like Vladimir
Putin against Ukraine? And you say to yourself, there’s a big difference. There is no difference.
For the last 200, 300 years, Ukraine has been a part of Russia and the Soviet Union. In fact,
three of their five former dictators that came out of the Soviet Union came from the Ukraine.
Stalin came from the Ukraine, Khrushchev came from the Ukraine.
So, as you can see, that it would be no different than an American state declaring itself to be its
own sovereign nation, and all the rest of the world agreed with it, but we would not probably
be too happy with it in Washington, D.C., as we were not too happy with it in 1861, were we?
But we have no problem telling other countries they do not have the right to claim land that
has always been theirs, but we have the right to do it to our own people, as we did in the Civil
War, where millions of people were wounded or killed on both sides, in a war that you have to
admit, if you’re following the standards we’re trying to follow today with, Ukraine was an
immoral, illegal war on the part of the Union, and not the South. In the entire Civil War, I don’t
believe there’s an incident other than guerrilla warfares like Quantrell and people like that from
the South, who did invade and attack civilians, but in the uniformed army of the Confederacy,
they did not attack civilian targets, as the Union did do, with Sherman’s famous march to the
sea, when he burned down every living thing and building between Atlanta and the seacoast of
the Atlantic Ocean in 1864. You have to admit that there General Lee at Gettysburg never
targeted any civilians.

At the first battle, a bull run, because everybody in Washington D.C. thought the Union would
win that battle in probably an hour or two. We lost, or the Union lost that miserably, but people
picnicked on the ridges overlooking the battle, think they were going to see like a movie, like
we would watch today, an action scene, and all of a sudden they saw their own soldiers running
past them, scared as rabbits, running from a fox, and were left alone to face the Confederate
army with their picnic baskets, and guess what? The Confederate army did not attack those
civilians, they did not kill or maim those civilians who were all Union sympathizers, but the
Union did it to the South, and for some reason that doesn’t really radiate in our textbooks and
our encyclopedias, does it? It depends on who the victor is, I guess, you know, the victor gets
the spoils, is that the old saying? Well, that is what the case with the Civil War, and then we have
to ask ourselves about Ukraine, but I want to get back after this word about the plain truth, I
want to get back to the Maduro trial. Bob Barney for theplaintruth.com, the place to go to to
find out what’s happening today, what it could mean to God in the Bible, and what you can do
about and prepare your family for your future.

That’s theplaintruth.com, go there every day. Well, we’re back, and we’re talking about the trial,
and if I was a defense lawyer, and I could be a defense lawyer for even a criminal, you know,
everybody has a right to a trial, that’s what’s in our Constitution, every person has a right to a
fair trial of their peers, I don’t know where we’re going to find 12 dictators, Putin, Xi Jinping, I
don’t know if we’re going to find 12 dictators to be on the jury, if we’re going to find peers for
Maduro, but maybe some drug kingpins could sit on the jury, too, but then I don’t think they’d
come back with a guilty verdict. But if I was a defense attorney for Maduro, I would say, isn’t it
amazing that Donald Trump’s Justice Department decided to arrest, illegally, I will argue, arrest
a foreign leader and bring him into the court system that convicted their own president, Donald
Trump, for all kinds of crimes that he is still under conviction for, and he called those courts in
New York City fraudulent, fake courts, and not legal, and now he wants me to defend a client
that he has captured from another country, and say these courts now can be impartial to this
person.
You understand, a good lawyer, when he starts manipulating or at least putting a magnifier on
the truth here, it does get pretty funny. Well, I want to tell you something that even gets
funnier. Did you read the indictment? You know, one of the charges against Maduro, and I find
this pretty clever, pretty funny, actually.
One of the charges against Maduro was he had possessions of machine guns, which is a felony
in the United States, without a permit. Where in the United States did Maduro have a machine
gun? Check it out for yourself. That is one of the charges that this Pambandi decided to bring
against Maduro back in 2020.
These are 2020 charges. Now, this is not a partisan issue here, because President Biden himself
also declared that Maduro was not the righteous leader of Venezuela, and actually put, I think,
a 25 million dollar bond on his head, a poster, like you have a wanted dead or alive in the old
west, on Maduro, I think it was in 2022, for 25 million dollars or 50 million dollars, something
like that. So the Democrats and the Republicans both wanted to oust a leader that they claim,
and possibly agree with, was not democratically elected.

But I got news for you. Is Putin democratically elected? Was Xi Jinping democratically elected?
Was the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq today? Are most of the Arab countries, almost all the
African countries, are they really elected by their people? Are they really democracies? And do
you have to be a democracy to be a legitimate country in this world? Is that the new rule? That
if you’re not a democracy, your leader can be captured and put in jail? If I was a defense
attorney, I would be asking the jury these questions, because I would suggest that Vladimir
Putin is 10 times the demon against the American people that Maduro is. Now, they say
Maduro was behind the drug trade, possibly, but they also say that China is the real culprit in
the drug trade with fentanyl.

That’s why we have a tariff against China. Why don’t we go and try to arrest Xi Jinping? Well, we
know we couldn’t get away with it. That’s one reason.

Then why don’t we wait till he comes to Mar-a-Lago the next time, when he’s got maybe 100
security guards around him, and surround him with 10,000 U.S. troops, and take him captive?
That wouldn’t work too good, would it? It only works when you’re a big, big, powerful country,
and you’re attacking a very little, itty-bitty country that really can’t defend itself. Then it works
quite good when you’re a bully. And bully politics might be good.
America might have to practice what the rest of the bullies of the world do. But then we
shouldn’t really say we’re self-righteous. We really shouldn’t say that we are following what we
want others to do to us, and we will do to them.
We’re not following the golden rule, no matter how you look at it. And I’m not saying that
Donald Trump did wrong. I’m not saying he did right.

I’m just saying, when you actually put a magnifying glass on this whole thing, we do not come
out necessarily smelling good. And this may be the reason why, in the past, when we propped
up the Shah of Iran, when we propped up Batista in Cuba, which gave us Castro, when we
declared war on Germany after World War I by putting impressive taxation and war crimes on
them, and made them pay war duties and restitutions that they could not afford to do, which
caused Germany to go into a recession and a depression. And then what gave us a worldwide
depression later on, and then Adolf Hitler and World War II, which killed some 80 million people
around the world? Whose blood is those 80 million people on? Is it just Adolf Hitler and
Hirohito, or is it Adolf Hitler, Hirohito, with all the things the Allies did to those countries before
the war that actually embittered the people? Will Venezuelan people, we see them marching in
the streets today, happy as can be in America.

Will the people who are left in Venezuela think it’s good? They may. It depends how we handle
the situation. If Donald Trump does a very good job, and he puts Venezuelans in charge of
everything, and he doesn’t rape the country of all their oil, which I’m not so sure that ain’t the
case, then I think the people of Venezuela will actually be happy this all happened.
They will see it as a liberation day for them. But if we go in there with our big oil companies,
and we rape the land of all of their oil, and we give them $3 a barrel, and get low prices for
gasoline in America, which will make you, me, and the whole middle class, lower class, and rich
people happy in this country, what will it do to the people in Venezuela if they stay and remain
in poverty? Will that be a problem for us in the future with Latin America, South America, the
people that are in our hemisphere, under our influence, who more and more are looking
towards China as their salvation instead of America? And why is that? Because China’s playing a
game. They’re playing a very smart strategy game of making sure they look good to the poor
peoples of the world, in Africa, in Asia, and in South America, by building their roads, and giving
them vehicles, and giving them all kinds of money, loans with no attachments to it.
And they look awful good to people who are not very intelligent in the first place, because
they’re, you know, third and fourth world people, but they see their life is getting better under
the communist Chinese, and they’re not really communist, by the way, I always tell you this, the
Chinese are really fascist. They’re really like Adolf Hitler. They don’t own their own businesses.
They are in cooperation with business owners in China. There are more billionaires in China
than there are in America. People don’t know that, but there are more billionaires in China than
there are in America.
So obviously, China doesn’t own, the country doesn’t own the businesses. They have
billionaires, like we have in this country, owning the businesses. So what you have here is really
what Adolf Hitler had with fascism, where the government helps private industry, but they only
help big business, like we’re doing in this country.
It’s called corporatism, if you want to know, if you don’t want to call it fascism, the polite word is
corporatism, where government plays footsie with big businesses, big media, big everything,
and they help those businesses put the little guy, the family business, out of business. This year,
or last year, 2025, more families declared bankruptcy than even during COVID. That should
alarm people about what’s happening in America with small businesses, small family
businesses especially, because what’s happening is big businesses are using government,
including this government right now, to put little guys out of business and have no competition.
And guess what happens after that happens? Prices go up. It’s called inflation. Inflation is not
under control, but we’re getting back to this next word, and I’m going to sum this up about the
what-if scenario if I was the lawyer for Maduro.

I’ll be right back. Plaintruth.com has a section called Your Health Today. It’s very important that
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That’s Your Health Today brought to you by theplaintruth.com. Well, we’re back for the last few
minutes of the program, and I was just putting out some what-ifs. I know people are going to
think, well, he’s against this whole thing. I don’t know where I come.
If we put boots on the ground and we have another Afghanistan or another Vietnam or another
Iraq, then I’m going to be against this. But right now, it might all come out well. It’s possibly
that Donald Trump is going to actually do a very good job, put the right people in charge, and
pull this whole thing off and lower the prices of gas at our pump, make the average Venezuelan
richer, happier, and be an example in South America.
The right way to go is to be allies of America instead of allies of China. This can all go well, but it
could go bad. But even if this goes well and Donald Trump pulls it all off and it goes very well
for everyone involved, it sets a precedent.
That’s something we all really should think about when we look at the strategy, if it was good or
bad, in anything that we do. Just because we win a war or just because we win something or we
are able to capture somebody without any loss of life, it does not necessarily mean that it is
good in the future for what becomes a precedent to do it again. And another president comes
to power, maybe one you didn’t vote for, maybe one you don’t really like, maybe one that you
think is a socialist or a communist or a democrat.
There’s no real difference, after all, is there? Maybe one of those presidents decides to do
something, and then all of a sudden it backfires and we find ourselves in another Vietnam. And
when you are upset about it, they come back and say, well, you let Donald Trump do this. Yeah,
but he pulled it off.

Yeah, but he set the precedent. So we didn’t pull it off. We got ourselves in trouble.
We caused World War III. Well, you know, things would happen. Well, that’s how your leaders
are going to talk, to be frank, because they’re never going to blame themselves when
something goes wrong, for somehow it’s going to be your and my fault when something goes
wrong, no matter who’s in charge, Republican or Democrat.
But my point is, we have to also realize when a president makes a decision, he is also
establishing precedent for other presidents to follow. We have, and Donald Trump, by the way,
has precedents for this. Bush did it to Noriega, right? Went down to his country, played all that
loud music, and they captured him and they brought him to America.
They tried him in a federal court, convicted him, and they put him in jail for the rest of his life.
And everybody was happy about it. And I did say at the time, didn’t have the plain truth then,
but I did have a site called racerap.com. It was a racing website, but we talked a lot of politics
on it.

It was the precursor to the plain truth. And I said at the time when George Bush did it, I had
reservations about going into another country and stealing a leader out of that country and
trying them in an American court, not even a military tribunal, for pity’s sakes, but an American
court made for American citizens. I had a problem with that then.
I might have that right now. But let’s get back to that last scenario, the one I mentioned about
stealing one of our presidents. It would not be that hard to do.
We think about, oh, you couldn’t go into Washington, D.C. with all the military around there and
all the security around the president and capture a president. You wouldn’t have to. The next
time the president goes to, let’s say, Moscow, and he gets off Air Force One, and all of a sudden
they are surrounded by 50,000 troops with machine guns and all kinds of rocket launchers, and
they instantly destroy Air Force One when the president steps off and drives away in a motor
car.
So there’s not even an Air Force One any longer. Are we going to go to war with Russia? Is the
Secretary of Defense, it’s the defense, not Secretary of War, by the way, because that would
have to be done by Congress. But would the Secretary of Defense then talk to the vice president
and declare war with Russia? Or would we try to negotiate something and demand his return?
Something that, I’m sorry, that Venezuela is doing right now.

The vice president is demanding the return of Maduro. And what does our government say or
our president say? Well, if she don’t play ball, she could be next, the threat. Bullies can do this
and get away with it, and Donald Trump probably can get away with it.
But again, if this was to happen to us, what would you think about it? Would you be happy?
Would you be dancing in the streets of New York? Would you be saying this is the greatest thing
that ever happened to America? Even if you hate Donald Trump, if it happened to Donald
Trump, and you’re a mega supporter, you’d be awfully upset, like this has never happened
before, and this is terrible, and the whole world has to be destroyed for this. But if you are an
anti-never-Trumper, I still think you would be very willing to go to war because you would see
this was, you can’t do this to America. And that’s the problem.

We have a situation in this country where we can do things to other people, but we would never
want them to do those same things back to us. And if you don’t think that’s a problem with God
and Christ and just morality, then you will see the problem that America may be facing with its
God. Because God wants the big-shot nations, nations like America, to act like they’re little guys
too.

God says, basically, if you want to cut through the mustard, you’re to treat your neighbor as
yourself. If you are a rich person, you’re not to treat your poor neighbor inferior to yourself.
You’re to treat your poor neighbor as yourself, like he’s a rich person too.
You’re not to show favoritism based on class, wealth, race, or anything, are you, according to
Christ? Doesn’t that apply to nations? Doesn’t that apply to the United States of America? Look
at what God says you should do when you’re warring against your enemy, and your enemy
needs water because he’s out of water. You’re to stop fighting and let him get water and drink
so he does not starve or die because of thirst. This is what God says how you fight a war.
You fight a war fairly. That’s what God’s saying, that you have to treat your enemy with respect.
I know that’s not what we do in war today, but that is what God says in his Bible you’re
supposed to do, is it not? Do I have to read the verses to you? I’m not going to do it in this
show.

I’m almost out of time. I’m not going to bother doing it in a show, but you know I’m right. You
know that God, who does command in the Old Testament to kill every man, woman, and child
of a whole race of people.

He’s done it against the Philistines, and the Canaanites, and the Amorites, and the Persiansites,
and all these other ites to kill everybody, man, woman, and child. God can be a very tough
warrior and tell his people to be tough warriors, but at the same time, that same God says if
one of them comes to you and he’s wounded, you’re to heal him. You’re to feed him.
You’re to feed the prisoner. You’re to treat him with respect. You’re to treat him like a human
being.

Maybe you’re going to cut off his head if God tells you that’s what the punishment is. As they
did, but read what Jesus Christ says in both the Old Testament as the Lord God Almighty, that’s
the identity of Jesus, and Jesus Christ of the New Testament, how you have to treat your enemy
fairly. And the United States of America needs to do the same, even though we’re the big bully
on the block.

Because there’s going to be a day, according to your Bible, the same Bible that I have, maybe a
different translation, same words, same ideas. United States of America is going to become a
poor nation again. It’s going to be under the thumb of a dictator from Europe called the King of
the North, the Antichrist.

And we’re going to be in the position of a third world nation when this happens. I don’t know
when it’s going to happen, but God says it’s going to happen to our people. And we’re going to
be the alien.

We’re going to be the people downtrodden. We’re going to be the people under the thumb of
ruthless people, people so ruthless that God is going to utterly destroy their race from all of
eternity. That’s how evil these people are going to be.
And we are going to see that we’re going to reap maybe what we sow when we deal falsely with
some of these lesser nations than ourselves. Well, that’s all I wanted to talk about today. I am
not saying we shouldn’t have done what we did.
I kind of think it might turn out well, but it could turn out really bad. That’s a really wishy-washy
answer because right now I don’t know what’s in the head of Donald Trump. Is it just pure
arrogance or is there a strategy? I know if you’re a Trump supporter, it’s always a strategy, even
when it’s not.
And if you’re a never-Trumper, it’s never a strategy, even when it is. Well, I’m honest. I don’t
know what it is.
We’ll find out, though, real soon. This is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth today, brought to you
by theplaintruth.com. Thank you for listening. We’ll be back again tomorrow.
Please tune in. Bye-bye.