Siding with dictators

The Obama Administration decides to meddle in Honduras:

Hugo Chávez's coalition-building efforts suffered a setback yesterday when the Honduran military sent its president packing for abusing the nation's constitution.

It seems that President Mel Zelaya miscalculated when he tried to emulate the success of his good friend Hugo in reshaping the Honduran Constitution to his liking.

But Honduras is not out of the Venezuelan woods yet. Yesterday the Central American country was being pressured to restore the authoritarian Mr. Zelaya by the likes of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Hillary Clinton and, of course, Hugo himself. The Organization of American States, having ignored Mr. Zelaya's abuses, also wants him back in power. It will be a miracle if Honduran patriots can hold their ground.

That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.

The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.

Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court's order.

The attorney general had already made clear that the referendum was illegal, and he further announced that he would prosecute anyone involved in carrying it out. Yesterday, Mr. Zelaya was arrested by the military and is now in exile in Costa Rica.

It remains to be seen what Mr. Zelaya's next move will be. It's not surprising that chavistas throughout the region are claiming that he was victim of a military coup. They want to hide the fact that the military was acting on a court order to defend the rule of law and the constitution, and that the Congress asserted itself for that purpose, too.

Mrs. Clinton has piled on as well. Yesterday she accused Honduras of violating "the precepts of the Interamerican Democratic Charter" and said it "should be condemned by all." Fidel Castro did just that. Mr. Chávez pledged to overthrow the new government.

Honduras is fighting back by strictly following the constitution. The Honduran Congress met in emergency session yesterday and designated its president as the interim executive as stipulated in Honduran law. It also said that presidential elections set for November will go forward. The Supreme Court later said that the military acted on its orders.

Obama weighed in forcefully:

U.S. President Barack Obama said on Monday the coup that ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was illegal and would set a "terrible precedent" of transition by military force unless it was reversed.

"We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras, the democratically elected president there," Obama told reporters after an Oval Office meeting with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

...

Obama said he would work with the Organization of American States and other international institutions to restore Zelaya to power and "see if we can resolve this in a peaceful way."

"It would be a terrible precedent if we start moving backwards into the era in which we are seeing military coups as a means of political transition, rather than democratic elections," Obama said, noting the region's progress in establishing democratic traditions in the past 20 years.

Interesting juxtaposition. 

When freedom loving Iranians rise up in defiance of theocratic mullahs, Obama decides largely to vote present (stay quiet) until just about every other Western leader had spoken up. 

And in this particular case, he joins the chorus of protest led by the likes of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and to speak against what seems to be a constitutional action taken by a sovereign state:

Besides opposition from the Congress, the Supreme Court, the electoral tribunal and the attorney general, the president had also become persona non grata with the Catholic Church and numerous evangelical church leaders. On Thursday evening his own party in Congress sponsored a resolution to investigate whether he is mentally unfit to remain in office.

But hey... he's got the President of the United States in his pocket.  Unbelievable.

But not really.

Comments

[Rosa]

The two situations ( Iran/Honduras)have a uniting thread both nations have a colonial past, and each has suffered through U.S. attempts to destabilize the regions for our own personal gain. Their respective histories effect how the U.S. can react in different ways. The U.S. cannot appear to have engineered either uprising. This explains the President's initial arms length approach to Iran. The general who headed the coup in Honduras was trained at the School of the Americas an institution created by the U.S. that has generally been used to train those who the U.S. would prefer to be in power in a given LA country before the U.S. funds and instigates an uprising in said country. With tensions between Venezuela beginning to chill, the U.S. cannot appear to follow the same misguided and hegemonic foreign policy tactics that have been used to exploit the region for centuries.
http://www.newsy.com/videos/honduras_pajamas_and_a_coup

[tim aka The Godless Heathen]

Let me see if I have this corrcet Rosa -

Demonstrators of a fraudulent election in theocratic Iran are given little to no support by Pres. Obama (but the rest of the western world did) but a democratic government getting rid of a power hungry wannabe dictator IS (along with such wonderful champions of freedom like Chavez, Castro and Ortega) and you justify it by???…blathering on about nonsense that has little or nothing to do with anything.

You aught’a run fur for office; cause you got the bullsh*t down good.