Amazon.com Widgets

As featured on p. 218 of "Bloggers on the Bus," under the name "a MyDD blogger."

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Coup De Grace

I remember seeing "Our Brand Is Crisis," with all the Clintonite campaign types using American-style techniques to get the dull neoliberal technocrat Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (nicknamed "Goni") elected in Bolivia through an image makeover and sophisticated polling. Eventually this led to riots in the streets after Goni tries to open their markets and after the corporations extracting the country's natural resources simply fleece the poor. Eventually, the populist Evo Morales rose to power.

It's fun to see the same kind of Clintonite defend a military coup to keep at bay the same kind of populist leader in Honduras:

Honduran business leaders are turning to Washington lobbyists to convince Congress that it should support rather than oppose the military removal of President Manuel Zelaya from office.

The Honduran branch of CEAL, the Latin American equivalent of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has hired Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe to make the case to U.S. lawmakers and foreign diplomats.

And leading the lobbying effort for the firm is partner Lanny Davis, the former special counsel to President Bill Clinton and well-known supporter of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton when she ran for president in 2008. (Davis is also a contributor to The Hill’s Pundits Blog.) [...]

Davis said he has not called Clinton to set up a meeting between her and Honduran government officials and does not plan to do so.

Davis said the business group wants to restore order to Honduras, which has been in upheaval since the country’s military ousted Zelaya on June 28 after he tried to alter the constitution.

“This is about the rule of law. That is the only message we have,” Davis said, adding that Zelaya “was acting unconstitutionally and illegally” when he pushed for a voter referendum to change presidential term limits. The Central American nation’s other branches of government opposed his move, and his decision to ignore them led to his ouster.


I certainly believe Lanny Davis would probably have been inside the government in some capacity in a Hillary Clinton Administration, and I'm glad he's instead on the outside agitating for military coups. Also of note - that the "rule of law" includes rousting an elected President out of bed in his pajamas and putting him on a plane. The overall story is more complex than that, but there's hardly a world where that happened that can be accurately termed as acting under the rule of law. Not even Bush-era right-wing judicial nominee Miguel Estrada can escape from that fact.

Labels: , , , ,

|