If the President Acts Illegally?

I was over at the VFW this evening, about 7:00 PM, looking to see if anybody showed for the cancelled Lowell Republican City Committee meeting when I feel into conversation with Jerry, a Marine who served in Viet-nam in 66-67.  We just overlapped.  But, we didn't talk about 'nam.  We talked about Honduras.

Turned out Jerry was up on events and had an informed opinion.&nbp; I was pleasantly surprised, in that I was afraid that this was just one more foreign news item that was being ignored by the general public.

For those wondering what is going on, I commend this short article at Small Wars Journal by Bob Killebrew, Colonel, US Army (ret). Titled "Not So Fast, Amigas y Amigos," it represents my prejudices.  Here is the second paragraph of the article

But now that we’ve exercised our moral indignation, we ought to step back and take a deep breath.  As reports continue to come in, it appears that it was Zelaya, not the army, that was most egregiously breaking the law.  The president was apparently involved in his own takeover, against the courts and Honduran Congress, and was about to stage a Chavez-style “referendum” on ballots printed in Venezuela and looted from an army warehouse where they were being safeguarded.  The army’s move was legitimized by the Honduran Supreme Court and applauded by the Congress, which has appointed a stand-in president until regular elections this November.

Later Colonel Killebrew says:

The Administration, and the United States, may soon come to a hard spot.  It is one thing to properly deplore a military coup, especially in a country that has stood with the United States in good times and bad. It will be quite another to join in the world’s condemnation of a government acting against a president attempting to subvert his own constitutional democracy,  just as Hitler did in 1933 and as Chavez is doing now in Venezuela. Surely self-defense is defensible.

And it will be still another thing to stand by, as may well become the case, while Chavez and his autocrat cronies assault the Honduran republic to re-install a fellow traveler who was – probably illegally, the full story is not yet known – deposed for attempting to do illegal things.

Personally, I think that President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton stepped off on the wrong foot here.  While we should never praise a military intervention, we should always consider the overall circumstances.  That was not done here by our leadership in DC.

Here is the statement from the Government of Honduras.  I have it on good authority that this is authentic.

Judge for yourself.

In the end, the US Government seems to be sanctioning the outrageous acts of sitting presidents (I give you Iran and Honduras), from a "Realist" point of view.  Out with the Bush 43 views about "democracy."  We are not being "pragmatic."

Regards  —  Cliff