Thugs of a Feather...

(Presidents Hugo Chaves of Venezuala and former Honduran president--as of now--Manuel Zelaya, pictured above).

Ray Walser rolls-in on the recent "coup" in Honduras.

A 'COUP' TO PROTECT A CONSTITUTION

By RAY WALSER

June 30, 2009 --

ON Sunday, the citizens of Honduras woke up with one president and went to bed with an other. Manuel Zelaya was forced out of the country -- replaced, with full backing from the Congress, the nation's courts, and its military with Interim President Robert Micheletti.

Some have denounced this dramatic change as a "coup d'etat" and an assault on democracy. In truth, it was much more of a last-ditch effort to protect Honduras' constitutional order and rule of law from a reckless populist.

Honduras and the United States have a long history of friendly relations. We signed a free-trade treaty in 2005; Honduras was an early contributor to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

But relations chilled, and chilled hard, after Zelaya won election nearly four years ago.
Zelaya sees Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Cuba's Fidel Castro as beacons for the future. As president, he tried to steer Honduras hard left -- but succeeded mainly in boosting corruption and cronyism. The independent monitors at Transparency International now give Honduras the same ranking for corruption as Libya and Ethiopia.

Honduras is a poor nation, and got worse on Zelaya's watch. But rather than blame the global downturn or his own failures, Zelaya sought to rally the masses behind him by fingering the nation's elites as behind the nation's woes.

He sought vindication by ordering a national referendum that, he said, could alter the Constitution and allow him to run for re-election. And when every free, democratic institution from the Electoral Tribunal to the Supreme Court said no to his proposal, Zelaya pushed ahead anyway.

Last week, he called the military on the carpet, demanding it support his referendum. Gen. Romeo Vasquez, the head of the armed forces, considered this an illegal order, and refused to play ball -- so Zelaya fired him. (He accepted the defense minister's resignation, too.)
The next day, the Supreme Court ruled the firing unjustified. Zelaya refused to obey its decision. The court, he declared, worked only for the rich and caused problems for "democracy."
At every step, Zelaya's chief international backer, Hugo Chavez, cheered him on.

He'd set Sunday as the day of his contra-constitutional referendum. Instead, the Congress, the courts and the military stepped in and pulled the plug on Zelaya's maneuverings.

They sent him packing on a plane to Costa Rica. Then, in a deliberate, bipartisan manner, they selected a civilian president to serve through scheduled elections in November.

This was no coup, but a desperate act to protect the nation's constitution and its institutions from presidential excess and a descent into misrule Chavez-style.

Chavez, of course, is outraged, vowing to do everything short of landing Venezuelan marines in Honduras to restore Zelaya. If his ally doesn't recover power, "el Loco" will lose face at home and throughout the region. Sources report Venezuelan agitators and operatives are already on the ground in the Honduran capitol of Tegucigalpa and elsewhere. Trouble can be expected.

Utopians in Washington believe that the Organization of American States, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, the European Union and the State Department will be able to put the toothpaste back in the tube. Let Ze laya back in power, they urge; defend "democracy."

This simply ignores the fact that restoring Zelaya would undercut every free institution in the nation -- green-lighting every extra-legal move he might take in the name of the people.
Washington realists recognize this fact and fear a return engagement. If Zelaya achieves his ambition and returns to power, he could condemn Honduras to years of vendetta politics and populism of the worst sort -- delivering a weakened nation into the eager embrace of Hugo Chavez & Co.

Letting a friendly country fall into the Chavez camp does no one any good. The new government of Honduras wants to preserve peace and the constitutional order. Warts and all, it deserves the chance.

Ray Walser is senior policy analyst for Latin America at The Heritage Foundation (heritage.org).

Meanwhile our own president has taken side with the ousted dictator-wannabe. This along with his near-silence about the Iranian protest makes me wonder who's side Obama is on.

Comrade Carla rolls-in with his "Clueless Comment of the Week":

We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the democratically elected president there," Obama said in Washington. "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."

No, but violating Honduras' constitution and engaging in fraudulent voting practices is apparently just fine--"authentic," even.

This initiated the following message traffic:

He called the coup illegal, too, which is odd given the Democrats' habitual deference to the courts.

I didn't know you could have a "legal" coup....

This one came pretty close. When the supreme court rules that the president is violating the constitution and he barrels ahead anyway, and the congress is in agreement, not having a coup would be illegal, too.

Comrade Karla: I think they just can't envisage a situation where the military is in the right--it just never computes for them.

Meanwhile, the UN ("Useless Nobodies"/Dictator's Club), demands Honduras reinstate el-presidente:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090630/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_honduras_coup

Movin' Outta Mesopotamia--Sort of...

For the past couple of days Ralph Peters has appeared on FOX News commenting about the US military's withdrawal from Iraqi cities. Here' s what he has to say in the New York Post:


BYE-BYE, BABYLON

By RALPH PETERS

June 30, 2009 --

OUR effort in Iraq passed a major milestone today: Our troops are leaving the cities.
Advisers remain in place. Joint patrols will still occur. And our forces will wait nearby to respond to Iraqi calls for support. But the last of the bases and US-only outposts within Iraq's urban centers will be vacated.

Terrorists have already begun testing the new security arrangements. Iraqi forces won't always pass with flying colors.

Yet this situation seemed a pipe dream not so long ago: Iraq's security forces, serving an elected government, assume primary responsibility for the good order of their own country.

We all recall the delighted leftist claims that Iraq had entered a hopeless civil war. Wrong. That Iraqis preferred al Qaeda to us. Wrong. That Shia militias represented the people. Wrong. And that Iran would seize control. Wrong again.

Looking back over six years of good intentions, tragic errors, generosity, arrogance, partisan vituperation, painful deaths and ultimate vindication, two things strike me: the ever-resisted lesson that human affairs are more complex than academic theories claim, and the simple truth that most human beings prefer a measure of freedom to immeasurable repression.

Now the symbolism of our troops withdrawing from Iraq's cities is richer than Washington grasps. Mesopotamia created urban culture: Ur, Babylon, Nineveh and countless lesser-known sites are where humans first worked out ways to live together in close quarters in large numbers. The coming wave of terror will strike cities that make Baghdad seem a youngster.
The "cradle of civilization" is rising from the grave again.

Yes, sectarianism, old grievances and the greed for power may deliver future crises -- even an eventual civil war. An unnatural state with grossly flawed borders, Iraq has more obstacles to overcome than any of its neighbors except Lebanon.

But our achievement remains profound: We gave one key Arab state a chance at freedom and democracy. We deposed a monstrous dictator who butchered his own people and invaded two foreign countries. And we didn't quit, despite the scorn of the global intelligentsia.

Human events aren't linear, nor do they conform to political programs. In Iraq, the unintended consequences ultimately gave us an unexpected victory.

We botched the occupation early on, which seemed to create an opportunity for our enemies. As a result, al Qaeda declared Iraq the central front in its war on civilization.

Thus, it set itself up for a massive strategic failure, alienating the people of Iraq and exposing itself as a fraud. Al Qaeda may limp along for decades, lashing out now and then -- but its high watermark occurred in 2006 in Anbar Province.

That single development made Iraq worthwhile.

But other gains, too, emerged from the vilified Bush administration's actions: As we just saw in Lebanon and Iran, democracy now seems possible to populations that had almost given up.
Iran will be free one day, the only question is when. And it won't be because of President Obama's grotesque Cairo apologia.

The problem for presidents is that great changes don't conform to our political calendars. Derided for his "axis of evil" remarks, Bush now looks far wiser than Obama in the wake of North Korean threats of nuclear devastation and Iran's savage crackdown following a wildly fraudulent election (and Tehran's attack on Obama's "interference," even though our president initially defended the election results).

There is evil in the world. No matter how resistant Obama may be to learning that basic lesson, our enemies will hammer it into him.

As our troops leave Iraq's cities today, their commanders know that still more bloody trials lie ahead. Now and then, the Iraqis will "shoot the red star cluster," calling for our help. But today isn't just a day for Iraqis to celebrate -- it's a good day for us, too.

And it's a day of vindication for a former president who saw clearly, but spoke poorly (to the delighted mortification of the media).

Now we have a president who expresses himself beautifully, but seems blind to international reality. And it's up to him to determine whether Iraq was a new beginning or a dead end.

Ralph Peters is Fox News' strategic analyst.

I loved his comparison of Bush and Obama.

Events by Any Other Name...

...really are the same.


One of my favorite commentators is Victor Davis Hanson, or "VDH" as we call him. He's admired by many of us for his incisive narratives and scholarly grasp of history. Normally he's not known for his tongue & cheek style, the way Mark Steyn is.

However, today on his Private Papers website, he posted a satirical piece about what's "changed" during these first 6 months of Obama's presidency. Maybe Mark's rubbing off on the good professor...

http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson062509.html

In case you didn't read the whole article, here's my favorite excerpt--

True, I was a bit taken back when the Somali pirates were killed. But I am sure that before their heads exploded someone at least text-messaged them their Miranda rights in a way never accorded the poor three who were waterboarded at Bush’s Guantanamo concentration camp.

We Tried Telling Him...

...but he wouldn't listen.

History proves you can't be nice to tyrants.

Apparently Ahmadinenutjob hasn't been swayed by our Community Organizer-in-Chief's messianic appeal:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090625/wl_nm/us_iran_election

Barney Frank: Still working hard to ruin the American housing market.

From Reuters, thanks to Comrade Karla who also used the exact phrase titled above:

http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-Housing/idUSTRE55L39120090622

"Both Fannie and Freddie are preparing a response to the lawmakers, according to the paper."

Okay, how long does it take to draft a letter saying: Are you out of your f-#$%-ing mind!?

Still Triangulating Over Iran

(Cartoon from Adam Smith at Wordpress)



While violence continues in Iran, our Community Organizer-in-Chief tries to stay above the fray.

Mark Steyn rolls-in again, this time on the some of the mainstream press, who're awed by Obama's awesome noncommittal awesomeness:

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTQyNmJjYzAxYTE3ODNmMjI0MjA3YzViYTRhMzVjNjA=

Meanwhile, Christopher Hutchings rolled-in a couple days back on the Iranians overactive conspiracy theories in Slate:

http://www.slate.com/id/2221020/?from=rss

More Threats by Mini Jong Ill Me

Not wanting to be left out of the Armeggeddon Biz, the North Korean Central News Agency warned that if the US starts another war, they will "...wipe out the aggressors on the globe once and for all."

Hmm. Where have we heard that before? Sounds like the junior partner in the Axis of Evil wants to flex his muscles.

They say imitation is the best form of flattery. Ahmadinejad should be flattered indeed. That is, when he's not too busy dodging rocks heaved by angry protesters.

Full story from Yahoo News:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/as_koreas_nuclear

And since we're comparing Imso Ronery with Ahmadinanutjob, here's some of 'jad's best party conversation-starters, courtesy of the Jerusalem Post:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1145961353170&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull

The Obama's Wishy-Washy Iranian Policy

The above phote, from Mandel Ngan of Getty Images; which could be titled "See ya!" to the protesters in Iran.

According to CNN, Obama has been "moved" by the images of the protesters. But not moved enough to actually come out and support them against their theocratic and tyrannical regime.

Fouad Ajami rolls-in on what Iran is teaching our "coolest" president:

Obama's Persian Tutorial

The president has to choose between the regime and the people in the streets.

By FOUAD AJAMI

President Barack Obama did not "lose" Iran. This is not a Jimmy Carter moment. But the foreign-policy education of America's 44th president has just begun. Hitherto, he had been cavalier about other lands, he had trusted in his own biography as a bridge to distant peoples, he had believed he could talk rogues and ideologues out of deeply held beliefs. His predecessor had drawn lines in the sand. He would look past them.

Thus a man who had been uneasy with his middle name (Hussein) during the presidential campaign would descend on Ankara and Cairo, inserting himself in a raging civil war over Islam itself. An Iranian theocratic regime had launched a bid for dominion in its region; Mr. Obama offered it an olive branch and waited for it to "unclench" its fist.

It was an odd, deeply conflicted message from Mr. Obama. He was at once a herald of change yet a practitioner of realpolitik. He would entice the crowds, yet assure the autocrats that the "diplomacy of freedom" that unsettled them during the presidency of George W. Bush is dead and buried. Grant the rulers in Tehran and Damascus their due: They were quick to take the measure of the new steward of American power. He had come to "engage" them. Gone was the hope of transforming these regimes or making them pay for their transgressions. The theocracy was said to be waiting on an American opening, and this new president would put an end to three decades of estrangement between the United States and Iran.

But in truth Iran had never wanted an opening to the U.S. For the length of three decades, the custodians of the theocracy have had precisely the level of enmity toward the U.S. they have wanted -- just enough to be an ideological glue for the regime but not enough to be a threat to their power. Iran's rulers have made their way in the world with relative ease. No White Army gathered to restore the dominion of the Pahlavis. The Cold War and oil bailed them out. So did the false hope that the revolution would mellow and make its peace with the world.

Mr. Obama may believe that his offer to Iran is a break with a hard-line American policy. But nothing could be further from the truth. In 1989, in his inaugural, George H.W. Bush extended an offer to Iran: "Good will begets good will," he said. A decade later, in a typically Clintonian spirit of penance and contrition, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright came forth with a full apology for America's role in the 1953 coup that ousted nationalist Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh.

Iran's rulers scoffed. They had inherited a world, and they were in no need of opening it to outsiders. They were able to fly under the radar. Selective, targeted deeds of terror, and oil income, enabled them to hold their regime intact. There is a Persian pride and a Persian solitude, and the impact of three decades of zeal and indoctrination. The drama of Barack Obama's election was not an affair of Iran. They had an election of their own to stage. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- a son of the Ayatollah Khomeini's revolutionary order, a man from the brigades of the regime, austere and indifferent to outsiders, an Iranian Everyman with badly fitting clothes and white socks -- was up for re-election.

The upper orders of his country loathed him and bristled under the system of controls that the mullahs and the military and the revolutionary brigades had put in place, but he had the power and the money and the organs of the state arrayed on his side. There was a discernible fault line in Iran. There were Iranians yearning for liberty, but we should not underestimate the power and the determination of those moved by the yearning for piety. Ahmadinejad's message of populism at home and defiance abroad, his assertion that the country's nuclear quest is a "closed file," settled and beyond discussion, have a resonance on Iranian soil. His challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, a generation older, could not compete with him on that terrain.

On the ruins of the ancien régime, the Iranian revolutionaries, it has to be conceded, have built a formidable state. The men who emerged out of a cruel and bloody struggle over their country's identity and spoils are a tenacious, merciless breed. Their capacity for repression is fearsome. We must rein in the modernist conceit that the bloggers, and the force of Twitter and Facebook, could win in the streets against the squads of the regime. That fight would be an Iranian drama, all outsiders mere spectators.

That ambivalence at the heart of the Obama diplomacy about freedom has not served American policy well in this crisis. We had tried to "cheat" -- an opening to the regime with an obligatory wink to those who took to the streets appalled by their rulers' cynicism and utter disregard for their people's intelligence and common sense -- and we were caught at it. Mr. Obama's statement that "the difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as had been advertised" put on cruel display the administration's incoherence. For once, there was an acknowledgment by this young president of history's burden: "Either way, we were going to be dealing with an Iranian regime that has historically been hostile to the United States, that has caused some problems in the neighborhood and is pursuing nuclear weapons." No Wilsonianism on offer here.

Mr. Obama will have to acknowledge the "foreignness" of foreign lands. His breezy self-assurance has been put on notice. The Obama administration believed its own rhetoric that the pro-Western March 14 coalition in Lebanon had ridden Mr. Obama's coattails to an electoral victory. (It had given every indication that it expected similar vindication in Iran.)
But the claim about Lebanon was hollow and reflected little understanding of the forces at play in Lebanon's politics. That contest was settled by Lebanese rules, and by the push and pull of Saudi and Syrian and Iranian interests in Lebanon.

Mr. Obama's June 4 speech in Cairo did not reshape the Islamic landscape. I was in Saudi Arabia when Mr. Obama traveled to Riyadh and Cairo. The earth did not move, life went on as usual. There were countless people puzzled by the presumption of the entire exercise, an outsider walking into sacred matters of their faith. In Saudi Arabia, and in the Arabic commentaries of other lands, there was unease that so complicated an ideological and cultural terrain could be approached with such ease and haste.

Days into his presidency, it should be recalled, Mr. Obama had spoken of his desire to restore to America's relation with the Muslim world the respect and mutual interest that had existed 30 or 20 years earlier. It so happened that he was speaking, almost to the day, on the 30th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution -- and that the time span he was referring to, his golden age, covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the American standoff with Libya, the fall of Beirut to the forces of terror, and the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Liberal opinion would have howled had this history been offered by George W. Bush, but Barack Obama was granted a waiver.

Little more than three decades ago, Jimmy Carter, another American president convinced that what had come before him could be annulled and wished away, called on the nation to shed its "inordinate fear of communism," and to put aside its concern with "traditional issues of war and peace" in favor of "new global issues of justice, equity and human rights." We had betrayed our principles in the course of the Cold War, he said, "fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is quenched with water." The Soviet answer to that brave, new world was the invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979.

Mr. Carter would try an atonement in the last year of his presidency. He would pose as a born-again hawk. It was too late in the hour for such redemption. It would take another standard-bearer, Ronald Reagan, to see that great struggle to victory.
Iran's ordeal and its ways shattered the Carter presidency. President Obama's Persian tutorial has just begun.

Mr. Ajami, a professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is the author of "The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq (Free Press, 2007).


A few days ago, Mark Steyn rolled in with his piece on how great powers don't have the option of being neutral. From the NRO:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDlhMmZmY2I1MjI0MTZlNDBhZmI3N2Y3ZDk2ZGZlYjA=

An on-line discussion followed--

Comrade Karla:

Very interesting….the sad thing is that the long-serving DOS [Department of State] realists have almost exactly the same perspective he does. So he's probably not being challenged very much by the diplomatic establishment

Regarding Karla's comment on DOS:

They're so desperate to talk with Iran that they are falling into the standard Realism trap, the same one that made Bush 41 publicly call for Ukraine and other states to not break from the USSR (one of many examples of where Realism misses the bigger picture).

Obama is trying to have it both ways (show some lukewarm support for the protestors while not overly antagonizing the current regime) and will end up by pissing off both sides. When in doubt, go with the more morally correct course!

Comrade Karla:

I don't know if this guy (for all his supposed intelligence) has any real foundation for understanding how foreign policy works.

There may well be a time for "realism," especially during the Cold War where sometimes we had two bad choices and had to choose one.

But now? Even the Euros (who will do nothing but talk) are supportive of the protestors. Obama seems genuinly irked that his attempt to outreach to Achmalandslide is being messed up by those ungrateful protestors who don't understand that they have "authentic" rulers.

Carter talks a lot of similar nonsense, so there are disturbing paralells.

And another thing…all those progressives who hate and detest dictatorial regimes….where are they? I only hear crickets. Must be because Halliburton doesn't feed the Pasdaran.

Happy Father's Day!

According to the infamous Wikipedia, Father's Day is celebrated in nearly 100 countries--including Iran. Although I think this year's homage to dear ol' dad was postponed (18 June 09).

Not every country celebrates Father's Day on the 3rd Sunday in June. So there's still time to plan that father-son expedition up Mount Everest! (Nepal--18 September 09).

In Bulgaria Father's Day falls on 26 December. Oh boy! Twice as many neckties!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father's_Day

USN Shadowing NoKo Ship

FOX News has been running this story for a couple of days. A North Korean ship, suspected of carrying contraband--even WMD material--is under surveillance by the US Navy.

The full FOX story is here:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/19/military-set-intercept-north-korean-ship-suspected-proliferatin-missiles-nukes/

This situation easily brings to mind one of the Nightmare Scenarios posted on Hot Air by "Doctor Zero":

http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2009/06/17/the-nightmare-scenario/

Obamacare Propaganda (Humor)

Despite how poor state-run healthcare is in Canada, the UK and Western Europe, Obama still wants to charge ahead and follow these nations down the same dreary path. As of now it appears that some Democratic lawmakers are having second thoughts about rationing-out medical services and its enormous cost.



I found this on Michelle Malkin's website. Only one news agency was allowed in the White House to discuss Obama's healthcare plan: ABC (the American Broadcasting Corp.)

Or as Michelle calls it: The All Barak Channel.