In my last hypothetical situation post I asked what life would be like if we treated the southwest the same way we treat Samaria and Judea (which I then followed up in "A Pet Peeve" and "Another Pet Peeve"). This time I have a completely different question, completely unrelated to Israel.

Let us suppose in 1987 Reagan announced he was running for his third term. Let us suppose he gathered together some militia groups, along with general supporters, and started to print up ballots for each state with his name on them. The various state legislatures, eager to stop this, would clearly order either the state police or national guard to seize these ballots. But let us then suppose Reagan's angry supporters would then attack the various warehouses in which these ballots were stored trying to retrieve them.

Finally, afraid of the mounting chaos, let us suppose that congress passed a law giving teeth to the 22nd amendment, saying that should a president refuse to leave office, the military has not only the right, but the duty to enforce the succession of the next president. Angry at this development, Reagan announces that he will ignore the congressional enactment, and so congress, recognizing that Reagan intends to ignore the law,  has the military remove him form office.

My question is, do you think the Organization of American States would have been making pronouncements in favor of Reagan? Or calling his ouster a "military coup"? Would Obama, in years to come, have sympathy for Reagan? Or be championing his cause?

And that is why I can't understand the enthusiasm for Zelaya. Well, I can understand as he is yet another left wing Central American* would be dictator, so I can understand why his fellow would be dictators like him. But I cannot for the life of me understand why other OAS members are supporting him. He clearly opposed the constitutional requirements for changing the Honduran constitution, he attempted what amounted to a coup, and he ignored the laws of Honduras.

So how on earth was his removal a military coup? Was my last speeding ticket the birth of a police state? The man broke the law and paid for it, we should be applauding, not criticizing.

Then again, given Obama's sad showing on Iran ("Is Obama a Republican?"), I am hardly surprised he was so wrong on this one as well.

I feel the need to say it again ("Glad The World Loves Us"), what makes Obama so much more "worldly" and "astute" than Bush on foreign affairs? Because he is cozying up to every petty tyrant in both hemispheres? Are they the ones thatt he elft was worried did not "love us" during the Bush administration? Why should we care? Would they have fretted about the opinions of Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Anotonescu and Horthy during the 40's? Or how Idi Amin, François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, Rafael Trujillo, Salvador Allende, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-Tung saw us in the 70's?

At least now I know what the left means by "world opinion", they mean the self-interest of every petty dictator. At least it makes it much easier to ignore them whenever they start saying "the world is against us" or "we can't go it alone". Now I can just shrug and say "I don't really care what Chavez thinks".

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* To be fair, it seems lately the nexus of left wing would be dictator creation seems to have moved from Central to South America once again. Even more strangely, we seem to have a dearth of matching right wing dictators. From the days following Simon Bolivar through the 1980's we always had pretty evenly matched socialist autocrats and right-leaning military juntas trading power back and forth with fairly long interruptions of real representative government. But of late it seems the military juntas have faded, at least compared to their past glories. (Of course this is an oversimplification and many nations had a much more stable history -- and a few a much less stable one -- but by and large Central and South America have had a relatively turbulent history. Then again, so did France and Germany in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, so it doesn't really say much about the quality of the nations themselves.)

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POSTSCRIPT

For those who point out that my Reagan analogy deviates from the facts of Zelaya in some specifics, I am aware of that, but I had to change the hypothetical to deal with the fact that we have state elections rather than a single election as does Honduras. In addition it is far more likely enforcement would be through law enforcement bodies than military under our government. Unlike many other nations in the Americas, we have little history of using the military for law enforcement (though we have in the past, say during union violence in the 19th century, or civil disturbances in the 1960's), and what history we do have has discouraged us from making use of it for that purpose. However, despite all the changes, I think the overall hypothetical makes a pretty good analogy to the sort of extra-constitutional coup that Zelaya was trying to stage, even if the specifics don't match.

POSTSCRIPT II

I was not aware when I wrote this that Conrad Black had made a similar comparison in NRO. However, as his mention was brief and hit on few of the same topics, I feel my writing still adds something.

One thought on Mr. Black's post, I don't get his comment that the nations of Central America should be reunified as we "don't need seven little countries". I think it was an off hand, silly remark, but I wonder what purpose he sees in having "lots of little countries" all over Europe or Africa. If the nations of Central America wish independence, who cares how small they are, or whether he sees a point in them? It just sounds rather arrogant and obnoxious, the sort of "I know best" comment I generally ascribe to authoritarians of the left and right, rather than conservatives who accept that others might know what they are doing.