“True, Zelaya should not have been arbitrarily exiled from his homeland.
That, however, does not mean he must be reinstalled as president of
Honduras. It merely makes him an indicted private citizen with a
meritorious immigration beef against his country. “

In short the legal order of the Supreme Court to arrest him was not followed. He was illegally deported. Denying hime the opportunity to be arrested and make his case before the court, by deporting him illegally and blocking the runway when he attempted to return is NOT a simple immigration case. It's a coup.

http://www.narconews.com/en.html

The foregoing is something a liberal Democrat would almost exclusively would be imagined of doing here.

A *** lot *** of contrition as well as overdue rehabilitation is in order. However, “most in need, least likely.”

It's not. That's why they misrepresent it as a referendum to extend his term.

“I agree it seems strange that simply talking about something as grounds for removal/impeachment/coup but that is Latin America for you.”

Those three actions are not interchangeable ones that can be justified on the same grounds. That may have been Latin America for you in 1982, but the world has moved on for the better, even if much of the Honduran elite prefers the old ways.

It was an old fantasy to see Bush and his cronies marched out of the White House at gun point for their egregious abuses of our constitution. Despite what some commenters may desire, I will never get over it and will keep reminding people how easily we can be duped by those in power.

The legalistic arguments being pushed by the pro-coupsters are empty, self-serving lies. They tend to rely on their own speculations to justify themselves with circular reasoning. It was a referendum to extend his term because that's what they speculate it would be used for eventually, you see. And you can't understand Fausta's insistence that it wasn't non-binding because the basis for that insistence is Fausta speculating that Zelaya would have somehow made it so after the fact, which would then be illegal, and therefore justifies the coup.

The question is merely asking the public if it agrees with the idea of doing such an assembly. There is no credible reason why this is illegal, not clearly so anyway. One side was interested in hearing the public's answer. The other side was absolutely determined that nobody ever hear that answer. We can believe the claims of the coup about why this is: that asking the public what it thinks about a public policy proposal is somehow anti-democratic tyranny that has to be stopped by all means necessary. Or, less absurdly, we can infer that the answer wasn't going to go the way the coup wanted, so they chose to preemptively silence the answer, and what we're hearing are the excuses they've cobbled together.

Most importantly, if the response to this question went in Zelaya's favor (as seems almost certain given the lengths taken to prevent anyone hearing the answer by his opponents), the most that would happen would be that it would be proposed that a binding version of the question be put into the ballot for the upcoming election, with the non-binding answer offered as public support for that proposal. If this went through then the question would go onto the ballot. This would mean that even if everything went Zelaya's way, by the time this could be voted on Honduras would already be electing a new president at the very same time. You wouldn't have an outcome to that question, let alone any assembly convened or anything changed, until Honduras already had a new president-elect. How can Zelaya extend his term by putting a question about a constitutional assembly on the ballot alongside who to elect as his replacement? Thus, you can see the emptiness of the claims that this was a personal power grab to extend Zelaya's term. It makes no sense, unless you accept some improbable and illogical chain of events the pro-coupsters choose to speculate would take place in the future.

The fact of the matter is that Honduras has an entrenched and corrupt establishment of wealthy interests that is accustomed to running things as they see fit without much interference from public opinion. And they have a highly undemocratic constitution, written in 1982 while Honduras was a US military base largely ruled by John Negroponte and the Reaganites, whose provisions are designed to insulate those entrenched interests against the possibility of democratic change. The possibility of rewriting the constitution would risk the outcome being a more democratic constitution that might reduce their unjust power. Therefore, those interests used a military coup to prevent this possibility and now concoct ridiculous scenarios to make Zelaya into some kind of bogeyman and throw around fake legalistic lies (and the word “Chavez” as much as possible) to blind people to what's actually going on.

Liberals should be attacking the Reps that are still in office for their blind support of Bush.

This addiction of attacking Bush is starting to become anti-productive.