Siding with Chavez?
Posted on June 30, 2009
Siding with Chavez?I wonder if President Obama feels comfortable siding with Hugo Chavez.
Chavez, who knows something about coups, is leading the opposition to the Honduran Coup, because his good buddy, Manuel Zelaya, was ousted by the military and replaced by somebody from his own political party.
Zelaya’s crime was to listen too closely to Mr. Chavez and try to run Honduras like Chavez has run Venezuela, which is to say, into the ground.
Zelaya, like Chavez, is a crackpot. He ran as a right of center candidate, but then had a change of heart in the middle of his term, became a left-wing darling of the Castro crowd, and then tried to change the Honduran Constitution so that he could keep taking Honduras to the left.
The military, with the full support of the Honduran Congress, said enough is enough, and they exported Mr. Zelaya to a different country.
America doesn’t have the best of reputations when it comes to coups and South America, and that history puts the Obama Administration in a tough spot.
They have to condemn the coup, because they don’t want the people of Central and South America thinking that the U.S. had anything to do with it.
On the other hand, it must make Mr. Obama somewhat uncomfortable to see allied with Mr. Chavez, the two-bit Banana Republic dicatator.
Chavez -- and his comrade in arms Daniel Ortega (as well as his other crackpot friend, Mr. Morales of Bolivia) -- are all inspired by the leadership of Fidel Castro. They all want to follow his example of opposing the United States, suppressing political dissent, expropriating private property, and generally installing Soviet-style government on their people.
Zelaya thought that Chavez and his coven had it about right, and he too wanted to join the dictator’s club.
The Honduran military, which enjoys close cooperation with the American military, wasn’t going to let that happen. Neither was the Honduran Congress nor the political party that Mr. Zelaya still belongs to and once led.
We should keep quiet on this one, and support the people of Honduras. They were tired of Mr. Zelaya’s erratic behavior and they weren’t going to support his power grab.
Military coups are never a good thing, but it was time for Mr. Zelaya to go. Let’s not give aid and comfort to that scourge of democracy, Mr. Chavez. Let the Hondurans handle it, and let’s hope that America stays out of it.