Cal Thomas writes today about Obama’s “Honduras predicament” — the predicament being Obama immediately meddled in what was decidedly not a “coup,” a meddling that had consequences for Hondureños, and he did so against the stark backdrop of his ballyhooed, world-renowned anti-meddling stance concerning the popular uprising in Iran in reaction to a rigged election.
In the course of his article, Thomas makes a point I made in discussing the Honduras problem. As I put it,
Socialists and assorted statists all have the same approach to democracy: they’re in favor of it up until the precise moment after they receive the vote they wanted, after which they have no use for spontaneous soundings of the people’s voice ever again and will invariably justify all their dictatorial actions with nonsense about it being “the will of the people.â€
Thomas makes the case in context of the U.S. putting the cart before the horse in championing world democracy vis-Ã -vis elections:
One of the flaws in U.S. policy in this and in the Bush administration has been our commitment to elections as an end and not a means. Elections can put scoundrels in power and the election that elevates them is often the last one a country sees until the miscreants are overthrown. That has been true of Hamas in the Palestinian legislative elections of 2006, Germany under Hitler, as well as Ortega and Chavez, among others. The United States should be supporting electoral processes that put people in office who are committed to the rule of law and representative government.
We cannot, alas, expect an American president who is a fan of such scoundrels as Chavez and Castro to appreciate a commitment to the rule of law and representative government when he sees it, because that’s what we are seeing in Honduras right now.
