SO I GUESS MADURO ISN'T AS SCARY A SUPERVILLAIN AS KHALID SHAIKH MUHAMMED, ACCORDING TO REPUBLICANS

Nicolas Maduro was captured and flown to New York so he can stand trial in America. Really?

I'm puzzled because President Trump doesn't merely refer to Maduro as a drug dealer. He calls Maduro a terrorist. He says that Venezuelan gangsters in America are Maduro's allies and are vicious. Here's what he said in his news conference yesterday:

It's, uh, it's both horrible and breathtaking that something like this could've been allowed to take place. For many years after his term as president of Venezuela expired, Maduro remained in power and waged a ceaseless campaign of violence, terror, and subversion against the United States of America, threatening not only our people, but the stability of the entire region.

And you all saw it. In addition to trafficking gigantic amounts of illegal drugs that inflicted untold suffering and human destruction all over the country, all over, in particular, the United States, Maduro sent savage and murderous gangs, including the bloodthirsty prison gang, Tren de Aragua, to terrorize American communities nationwide.

And he did indeed. They were in Colorado. They took over apartment complexes. They cut the fingers off people if they called police. They were brutal.

This is a distortion of the truth -- experts don't believe Maduro is working with TdA, and the Aurora police have said there's no evidence the gang took over an aprtment complex. But according to Trump, it's safe to try Maduro in America. Trump isn't arguing that it's too dangerous, and neither are his allies.

That's a huge contrast to Barack Obama's first term, when Obama and his first attorney general, Eric Holder, wanted to try Khalid Shaikh Muhammed and other 9/11 terror plotters in a civilian court. Republicans flipped out and non-Republicans joined them.

A rally near the federal court building in Foley Square, in lower Manhattan, was held on December 5, 2010, at which the decision to transfer the case to a civilian court was severely criticized. It was organized, in part, by Debra Burlingame, the sister of the pilot Charles Burlingame, who was killed when Al Qaeda hijackers crashed the plane he had been flying into the Pentagon. Burlingame is one of the three founders of Keep America Safe, a political-advocacy group.

Burlingame would later be controversial for tweets that called Obama and Trayvon Martin "drug addicts" and attacked all Muslims:

In a 2014 Twitter post, Burlingame wrote "When are citizens going to rise up and demand the govt acknowledge that Islam is a transnational threat."

In a 2014 interview on Fox News, Burlingame was asked by the host whether she was a Islamophobe according to accusations from critics. Burlingame responded by saying "I am hard pressed to deny it. There's no such thing as an irrational fear of Islam or Muslims when we know that virtually 80% of terrorist attacks are committed by radical muslims who are motivated by what they deem to be an imperative from their sacred religious texts."

Another co-founder was Liz Cheney. The group wasn't shy about portraying itself as nakedly partisan:

Liz Cheney's new group, Keep America Safe, is gearing up to run a series of targeted radio and Web ads hitting the president in the home districts of vulnerable Democratic congressmen, said Michael Goldfarb, a political strategist for the group.

The ads, according to Goldfarb will "drill down" on Guantánamo, highlighting the terrorist background of especially dangerous detainees and suggesting that Obama's policies might result in the accused terrorists being let loose and allowed to walk free in the member of Congress' district.

The theme of the new ad campaign is going to be "Do you really want this guy in the neighborhood?" said Goldfarb....

... Keep America Safe leaders, including Liz Cheney and Goldfarb's Weekly Standard boss, William Kristol, are convinced the issue has political traction. The group plans to morph the radio campaign in about six months into higher-profile television ads that will be deisgned keep the issue front and center during [2010's] congressional races.

Democrats fell in line:

In a letter to president Barack Obama, Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, suggested that holding a trial in New York was dangerous. "New York City has been a high-priority target since at least the first World Trade Center bombing", she wrote. "The trial of the most significant terrorist in custody would add to the threat."

As, in 2011, did the mayor of New York, Mike Bloomberg, who was an independent at the time and probably wanted a Republican elected president the following year. That was the final straw:

The White House ordered the Justice Department Thursday night to consider other places to try the 9/11 terror suspects after a wave of opposition to holding the trial in lower Manhattan.

The dramatic turnabout came hours after Mayor Bloomberg said he would "prefer that they did it elsewhere" and then spoke to Attorney General Eric Holder.

"It would be an inconvenience at the least, and probably that's too mild a word for people that live in the neighborhood and businesses in the neighborhood," Bloomberg told reporters.

"There are places that would be less expensive for the taxpayers and less disruptive for New York City."

The trial would have been expensive:

Estimates put the cost of a multiyear terror trial in lower Manhattan at about $200 million a year....

The federal government has said they would reimburse the city for the costs, most of which cover overtime for increased security, but they won't reimburse business owners for lost revenue during the chaos, said Steven Spinola, president of the heavyweight business group Real Estate Board of New York.

"Is the federal government going to give the city $1 billion plus the cost of propping up businesses? I don't think so," Spinola said.

But as James Gordon Meek of the New York Daily News wrote at the time:

It's worth noting here that the hundreds, if not thousands, of extra federal prosecutors, defense lawyers, cops, U.S. Marshals, FBI agents and international news media who will prosecute, defend, protect or cover the biggest terror trial in history will be spending millions in hotels, eateries, bars and shops. You might even argue they'll surely more than offset any losses from the added inconveniences.

But Muslim terrorists in downtown Manhattan was the other part of the message, as if Muslim terrorists were scary supervillains who, if allowed to escape, could not be stopped. Jim Geraghty of National Review wrote in 2009:

... not all dangerous men are the same. It's hard to picture militia members, the Crips, Bloods, or what have you doing something as extreme as, say, crashing a plane into the prison to faciliate an escape and/or provide martyrdom to their brethren.

But Trump says Maduro's alleged gang allies are extremely brutal. They cut people's fingers off! (This apparently happened in America once.)

When Obama was president, we were told that trying a violent terrorist on U.S. soil was unthinkable (Mohammed's case was moved back into the military system, and he still hasn't been tried), even though, in 1996, Omar Abdel Rahman, the "Blind Sheikh," one of the planners of the 1993 World Trade Center attack, was tried and convicted in Lower Manhattan without incident. Then it became unthinkable. Now I guess it's thinkable again.