If Bush had decided that term limits were passe’, and announced a referendum to allow him to stay in power (a referendum which was reportedly complete with intimidation, ballot fixing, and other shenanigans), and the congress unanimously opposed him and the Supreme Court ordered him to stop, and then he demanded that the military take over and fly the ballots around, and the military refused, so he fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and then he used some RNC goons to break into the ballot warehouse and take the ballots, then cut a deal with Mexico to use Mexican planes to fly the ballots because the military wouldn’t do it…
If all that was going on, and the Congress ordered Bush forcibly removed from the While House, and the Supreme Court signed off on it as being a constitutionally-approved move, and the speaker of the house was declared President according to the constitution…
I have a problem with hypotheticals based on the blatant misinterpretation of facts designed to try to catch your opponents in some sort of moral quandary.
Except for the fact that Zelaya did nothing of the sort, as has been explained , with cites, multiple times in this very thread.
Except that the Honduran congress did not do that (I think it was the SC), except that the correct move would have been to start impeachment proceedings, except that the VP and not the speaker should be declared president according to the constitution…
So, yes, except for being completely wrong I guess you are right.
As you may have noticed, Sam, there is some question afoot as to whether or not your recitation actually fits the facts. I don’t know what those facts are, there is considerable smoke and mirrors here. What evidence can you offer that the “facts” offered by a news outlet that most aligns with your own viewpoint is more truthy that the other?
We lefties have been right rather often, in case it has escaped your attention.
Says the guy that demonstrated that knows diddly squat about history.
It is joke anyhow, it points to the fact that the ones that you disdain are correct in this case.
As I mentioned before, when the left in Ecuador took over they were the idiots. Even if the mayoralty of the population was in favor of the coup.
Today, even if a good chunk of Hondurans think that this is a great thing to do they are the idiots.
2 crimes are clear to me:
I can not find in their constitution anything that would allow the courts** to order the removal and expulsion of a head of state** (So much for habeas corpus). If they were doing this in the proper way they should have captured him and put him on trial… But this creates a problem, it would then be clear that he is not resigning. So enter crime 2:
A false document was created to show to congress that Zelaya had resigned.
With that the congress acted to select the puppet.
A puppet that got selected based on a false document.
Those crimes are way more serious than any pumped allegations mentioned against Zelaya, but even here I would think that the most likely solution will be to negotiate and to not allow any of the parties to succeed, and a new conciliatory candidate will have to be named.
That’s interesting, because I just went back through this thread again, and I can find no such cites. There’s a foreign language blog that Redfury linked to, but not being able to read it I have no idea what it says, what its bias is, or anything else about it. The other cite list is DailyKos, which I countered with a cite from National Review. You know, for balance. Especially since the DailyKos entry does not even attempt to present the other side’s point of view, or even to report on facts that seem to be generally agreed on, such as that the Supreme Court declared the referendum unconstitutional and that the military was operating under court order.
Of the other cites listed in this thread, the Telegraph, quotes the Honduran Supreme Court:
Unless you’re suggesting that the Supreme Court is the body that staged the ‘coup’… They themselves say that the military was forced to do this by court order.
The BBC cite merely repeats the claims of both sides.
The Wall Street Journal cite repeats the chain of events that I listed in my first post.
Another cite, “Global IT News”, doesn’t actually appear to have anything on it about this. Not that I could find, anyway.
So… So far I haven’t seen a single cite that backed up the claims in this thread, but several that back up mine.
I’ve been trying to find an actual factual accounting online, and haven’t been able to find one outside of various editorials and opinion pages. Would someone have such a cite? Say, from the Associated Press or some other respected news outfit?
I agree that impeachment proceedings seem to be the correct mechanism, but if the claims are true that Venezuela was heavily influencing this (one of the claims against the referendum is that Venezuela was flooding the borders with people to stack the vote in Zelaya’s favor), then maybe it was felt that a traditional impeachment could lead to violence from Chavez and others. I don’t know. I would certainly like to hear from the new Honduran government why they felt it necessary to do what they did.
If you keep saying that enough, maybe you can get everyone to believe it. Until then, how about citing some facts?
If you haven’t noticed, I’m still not claiming to know the ‘truth’ here. So far, the truth seems somewhat slippery, and the real reporting on this is amazingly weak. So basically what we have is a lot of editorial comment from both ends of the political spectrum, and the stated claims of Zelaya and the new government, both of which I assume are biased. I’d like to hear some actual facts from reporters on the ground in Honduras, from non-aligned sources in the government, the CIA or NSA, British intelligence, whatever. Something more than 'He said - she said"
We actually agree that there seems to be considerable smoke and mirrors, and that the ‘facts’ seem rather fuzzy. I just said the same thing in my last message.
Oh, that’s rich. How’s that stimulus working out? It’s good to see that opening dialog with Iran and North Korea would pay off like the left said it would, huh? But at least there’s no more rendition, no more warrantless wiretapping, and all the Gitmo prisoners are free. Because the left said that if Obama were elected, he’d fix all that stuff. Now that the left is in power, the world is a much happier place.
Just by taking habeas corpus into account, the conclusion is inescapable:
Either the courts or the army broke the law by not putting the president under custody or by ordering the expulsion of the president and to “obtain” a resignation from Zelaya.
Logic is better, it says that there was a coup and that the authorities resorted to bigger crimes to get their way against Zelaya.
BTW even in Spanish it is clear that the date on the resignation document is evidence enough to show that a crime was committed.
Really? It seems to me that both sides are somewhat guilty, from what we know so far. Zelaya started it by violating the constitution, refusing to accept a Supreme Court ruling and an order of Congress, then firing his own military leader and trying to do an end-run around the entire process. The government responded to legally remove him, but then perhaps overstepped their bounds and had him removed from the country, then perhaps forged a resignation letter to try to quell possible violence in the aftermath.
Which action is ‘worse’ is more of an editorial comment than a statement of fact at this point, don’t you think?
Believe it or not, some contards (not here, but on other boards I frequent) are actually calling Zelaya a Communist, and asserting that as an established fact… Apparently the thinking (if that is not too strong a word) is that any leader who for whatever reason gets friendly with Castro (who is a Communist) and Chavez (who is not) must be a Communist. Or something like that.
I can read spanish and though you have tried to dismiss it, they offer a link to the “resignation” document. The date on the document is from 3 days before the coup and the president denies that he signed it.
Just that requires that the congress stop and at least investigate the validity of the document, this was not done.
As mentioned before, I do not expect right wingers to demand an explanation of their news sources as to why they are so misleading. They will still consider them reliable no matter what.
Why am I not surprised to watch Sam storm in here to spread nonsensical rightwing propaganda that had already been debunked prior to his appearance? Because it is not the first time (nor I suspect the last) that I have seen him fall on the wrong side of history. Apparently he (as well as sources) is unaware that today’s LA is not the Latin America that was so easily kept under the thumb of by the trifecta formed by the oligarchies, corrupt military (many of them straight out of the nefarious School Of The Americas) and the interests of corporate America. For good or ill lots has changed over the past decade and today they have a number of Treaties (Grupo Rio, ALBA, SICA, MERCOSUR, CARICOM) that were entered into by LA nations with the notion of prioritizing their own interests as opposed to tagging along with the failed policies of old. Interestingly, all these alliances (intertwined in some cases) stood front and center, from the start, against this travesty – laughable in its inept execution – and left little room for maneuver within the once US-dominated OAS.
Obama’s response, of course, was the only correct one in the face of both US credibility (which as we all know has taken a pounding over the past decade) and its adherence to democratic values. OTOH while the US doesn’t appear on the face of present evidence to have had an active involvement in the coup, it also strains belief that the CIA wasn’t aware of the unfolding events. Fact is Honduras had long been little more than a staging ground for any number of American-led operations in the region, what with the wink and a nod (read: very expensive bribe) to the unconstitutional Soto Cano base and the staggering number of Honduran officers that are graduates of the nefarious SOA – including “coincidentally” the very general who lead the coup.
What does it all mean? Well beyond the obvious fact that this is likely to become a major landmark in the future of US/LA relations, it will also set a clear line in the sand as to what democracies in Latin America are and are not allowed to do. Obviously again, if the coup is somehow “allowed” to succeed we are looking straight back into the barrel of history – a very cruel history that I am quite sure the great majority of Latin American people want distance themselves from.
How long will this last? Hard to tell, but I do know that if Obama took the next logical and legal step (he did openly call it a “military coup”), the US would suspend any and all foreign aid to the de facto Honduran regime. Seeing as more than 70% of their income is either generated by trade with and/or aid from the United States, I simply can’t see them holding out much longer. As it is, aside the OAS ultimatum, maximum political and economic force is being projected by any number of organisms such as the World Bank and the Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID). On top of that, beyond the large number of ambassadors recalled by LA states, Spain’s Foreign Policy Minister, M.A. Moratinos has recently announced that he Spanish-led initiative to recall all EU ambassadors to Honduras has been adopted unanimously. Meanwhile the only response given by the Honduran clumsy usurpers has been to effectively implement a “estado de sitio”, literally a “state of siege” but better translated as goverment through marcial law. Cite.
Obviously, as dictatorships go, the proposal was quickly and unanimously passed.
So, to any and all that still back this crude military/oligarchy take over, do so, but please, pretty please, leave any semblance of “democracy” behind your propaganda/“legal arguments”/pleads.
IOW, drop the facade. You are only fooling yourselves.
According to my GF, every four years the party in office gets thrown out due to corruption. Four years later, the other party gets thrown out due to corruption. IOW, Zeyala was elected four years ago because of the corruption of the other party, not because of any great popularity on his part.
Politically speaking, wouldn’t the World Bank prefer the new government to Zelaya’s?