Posted on 06/30/2009 6:29:09 AM PDT by Kaslin
The news that Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was removed from his post and spirited out of the country by the Honduran military has elicited official condemnations from the governments of France, Ecuador, Chile, Spain, and Argentina; as well as protests from the Organization of American States and the United Nations. The U.S. State Department called the events an "attempted coup," and demanded that Mr. Zelaya be returned to power in order to facilitate the "restoration of democratic order."
Hold on. There was an attempted coup in Honduras, but it was Zelaya who initiated it, not his opponents. As the invaluable Mary Anastasia O'Grady reported in the Wall Street Journal, Zelaya, a Hugo Chavez acolyte, was attempting to ape his mentor by rewriting Honduras' constitution. Under Honduran law, however, the president cannot call a referendum on the constitution on his own authority. O'Grady explains: "While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite ... 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. Chavez 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 attorney general of Honduras, as well as the nation's Supreme Court, had declared the referendum illegal. Zelaya attempted an end run. O'Grady writes: "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."
Zelaya had a good teacher. Hugo Chavez has been patiently and persistently undermining the democratic character of Venezuela for 11 years -- a slow-motion coup. Just a day before Zelaya's confrontation with the army and the courts came to a head, thousands of Venezuelans once more took to the streets of Caracas, this time to protest the threatened closure of Globovision, the only remaining television channel in the country critical of President for Life Chavez. Two years ago, RCTV (Radio Caracas Television), then the nation's leading station, lost its license because it declined to provide fawning coverage of Chavez (one is tempted to call him "the Dear One" as they do in North Korea). "The media terrorism in Venezuela is a permanent practice by a big part of the private media," Andres Izarra, a government spokesman, explained to the Washington Post. "Messages of hate," Izarra asserted, "some inserted subliminally," had been detected by the government even in entertainment shows. Chavez has hardly been subtle about his goals. In a statement that could have come from Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, or Joseph Stalin, he declared, "I am going to go after those resisting the revolution and eliminate them one by one." His targets have included priests, independent journalists, businessmen, opposition politicians, and Venezuela's tiny Jewish community.
Globovision stands accused by the government of "media terrorism" because a commentator suggested that Chavez might end his days the way Benito Mussolini did. Two weeks ago, CBS reports, police raided the home of Globovision's president, Guillermo Zuloaga, and ordered the station to pay $2.3 million for giving free airtime to anti-government groups during a 2002 oil strike. The government was further enraged when Globovision provided coverage of an earthquake before the official media arrived on scene, and particularly that Globovision was critical of the government's handling of relief. Chavez accused the station of spreading terror and needlessly alarming the nation.
If Globovision is silenced, there will be no free television at all in Venezuela. Thousands of Venezuelans marched to protest the dying of the light, yet foreign ministries around the world were silent. Neither Secretary of State Clinton nor President Obama has breathed a word of condemnation of Chavez's slow strangling of freedom in Venezuela, nor his export of Chavismo to Nicaragua, Bolivia, or Honduras. But without a moment's reflection, the secretary of state and the president offered crucial diplomatic support to Chavez disciple Manuel Zelaya.
When Barack Obama was asked about the book Chavez handed him last April, "Open Veins of Latin America," the president said he hadn't read it. Now I'm not so sure.
Powder..patch..ball FIRE!
Watch this playbook when Zero attempts to steal the next presidential election.. or serves two and wants to be president for life...
The spark for this powder keg was briefly reported elsewhere, involving some of Zelaya's supporters breaking into a military installation to acquire voting equipment/ballots/something. He touched the third rail: unauthorized activity, by ANYBODY, on military turf is bad mojo.
Remember that this Secretary General of the OEA is the same one who said that Chavez was not allied with the FARC in Colombia....and who begged Castro to return to the OEA. He’s a Marxist Chilean.
He’ll steal the next one but not in such a blatant manner.
2016 is where he’ll use this playbook and not step down.
If something isn’t done to stop him. And by that, I mean a state by state rebellion.
***Ousted leader announces bid to return to Honduras***
http://www.magicvalley.com/articles/2009/06/30/ap/international/d99502f80.txt
The United States was founded on the principle that governmental power flows from the ground up, with the people being the holders of the power and their distribution of that power up through the various branches of government.
Obama condemned the Honduran action because he sees it as a threat to his own conception of power. I can only pray that the country survives this megalomaniac's attempt to "Change" America. Frankly I can only pray that someday Obama and Michelle ar escorted out of the White House in their pajamas and exiled to Venezuela or Cuba, or Iran, where they will be more comfortable.
I’ve been wondering how a grass roots effort to ammend the constitution can succeed.
I vaguely remember the attempts in the 70s/80s to get some kind of “equal rights” ammendment.
How can “we” start that type of movement? We need term limits on Congress. We need the 16th ammendment repealed. We need to consititutionally outlaw federal mandates on states that threaten funding. Hell, we need to reaffirm that anything not specifically authorized as federal authority lies with only the states. I would even be happy to see all federal laws have mandated sunsets.
It was an attempted “auto-golpe,” a “self coup,” when an elected leader attempts to seize power permanently and unconstitutionally. The person staging the self-coup was Zelaya, and the constitutional powers responded appropriately and removed him.
The Honduran constitution provides for exile from the country in a case like this. Pity it didn’t provide for death, which unfortunately is the only way to keep a leftwing dictator down.
I wonder what good such a reaffirmation would do, even if it were an Amendment. We HAVE an amendment to this effect, already, and the left ignores it because any and all laws/constitutions/contracts "bind current generations to the values and knowledge of the time of their writing". Leftists see that as a problem instead of as of superlative value.
Gads, what a biased, uncomprehending article that is (by the AP reporters).
Anybody want to bet that Bambi attempts to use the US military to force Honduras to take this guy back? I think that’s a serious danger and I hope that people in the know are working against this.
Why can’t we have a coup? Why do the Hondurans get to have all the fun?
“Did Someone Say Coup?”
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More like coo-coo....
http://gunnyg.wordpress.com/2007/07/22/coup-detat-seven-days-in-may/
I don’t think we need to amend or rewrite our constitution, we simply need to start enforcing it and stop ‘interpreting’ it.
Opening up a constitutional convention would be an extremely dangerous thing to do right now since it seems that our populace is in favor of a pure democracy and doesn’t seem to have the intelligence or foresight needed to avoid it.
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