Tuesday, March 30, 2010 – Michael Rubin and Andy McCarthy

on Mar 31, 2010

Frank begins with an account of the appalling treatment of faithful U.S. allies in Honduras by the U.S State Departments wrathful severance of aid.  Michael Rubin joins Frank with insights on Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan that you just can’t get anywhere else.  Frank then analyzes Ambassador John Bolton’s recent speech on sovereignty issues at the Heritage Foundation.  Amidst the disingenuous hype about the “Threat” of “Christian” militias in north any-town, USA, Frank and Andy McCarthy clarify the true threats to your safety and security with consistent clarity.

MONOLOGUE – March 30, 2010

We have been talking a lot lately, both on Secure Freedom Radio’s air and elsewhere, about the travesty, there is no more appropriate word for it, the travesty of Barack Obama’s treatment of America’s allies, specifically the state of Israel – a democratic state committed, as are we, to freedom, under assault incessantly not just from its declared enemies in its immediate neighborhood but, it would appear, from most of the rest of the world as well.
But I want to segue to a different example of the despicable treatment that the Obama administration has been subjecting another of America’s allies to in recent months. An infamous pattern that I’m afraid will bring us great grief. I’m talking about Honduras, and we haven’t discussed it lately because frankly, it looked as though the administration had learned its lesson. Let’s go to the audio tape here and play initially how president Obama responded to a coup that took place in Honduras back in June of 2009, “President Zelaya was democratically elected, he had not yet completed his term, we believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras, the democratically elected president there.” Well that was the initial salvo.

To recap, President Zelaya was an ally of Hugo Chavez who was increasingly following in the Venezuelan dictator’s footsteps by trying to hijack the democratic institutions and government of his country and turn it into, as Chavez did, a personal fiefdom.
He was removed from power in accordance with the Honduran constitution. He was dispatched in what President Obama called a coup by the military to neighboring El Salvador as I recall. From there he mounted a campaign to be reinstated which the Obama administration threw itself into.

And here’s another clip in which the Obama administration went beyond calling the coup as illegal and applied crippling economic sanctions against a democratic country allied with the United States, “The Department of State announces the termination of a broad range of assistance to the government of Honduras as the result of the coup d’état that took place on June 28. The Secretary has already suspended assistance shortly after the coup. The Secretary of State has made the decision consistent with US legislation, recognizing the need for strong measures in light of the continued resistance of the adoption of the San Jose accord by the de facto regime.” Well that was PJ Crowly, the press spokesman for the state department, back in June I believe it was, no excuse me, September 3rd as the administration tried to turn up the heat on the government of Honduras, the government that was brought into power, again, in accordance with the constitution, at the direction of the Supreme Court of Honduras, and the congress of Honduras in order to safeguard democracy. So the United States was absolutely, unalterably on the wrong side.
And to its enormous credit, the country of Honduras, the people and the government of Honduras, defied this odious pressure from the United States. Talk about the Yankee big brother; interference in the internal affairs of that country were unspeakably inappropriate and wrong. Mary O’Grady, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, a woman I just revere because she’s paying close attention to Latin America week in and week out, she knows her stuff and she documented what happened there, that gave rise to the defeat of the Obama administration at the hands of this tiny country, desperately poor country, and that defeat was signaled in this clip from March 4th, 2010, “Everything that Honduras has taken, important and necessary steps that deserve recognition and the normalization of relations. I just sent a letter to the Congress of the United States notifying them that we will be restoring aid to Honduras, other countries in the region say that they want to wait a while, I don’t know what they’re waiting for but that’s their right to wait, We believe that President Lobo and his administration have taken the steps necessary to restore democracy, and we share the condemnation of the coup that occurred, but we think it’s time to move forward and ensure that such disruptions of democracy do not and cannot happen in the future.”

Well that was a climb-down by the Secretary of State, I said March 4th, I think it was actually late last year after the elections that put into power Porfirio Lobo as the duly elected replacement to the interim government, committed to democracy, committed to freedom that the United States government recognized and considered legitimate.
Now here’s the thing that Mary O’Grady writes in this column in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, you’d think that was the end of it, you’d think that would normalize relations with this government in good faith, help it back on its feet after a very difficult time, a time made unnecessarily more difficult by the United States Government, but instead, as Mary O’Grady documents, the United State’s Government has been continuing, particularly in the person of US Ambassador Hugo Llorens, our representative to Honduras, continues to try undermine this democratically elected country, this allied country, this sovereign nation aligned with our values and committed to the same sorts of sorts of principles that we are supposed to hold dear in Latin America and beyond.

This is a travesty; we’ll be following it more closely in the days ahead and I just wanted to let you know, don’t think for a moment the Obama administration is deviating, anywhere in the world, from this misbegotten idea that it is better to hurt our friends and help our enemies rather than the other way around. A travesty, indeed.