Doing Away With Those Inconvenient Civil Liberties

I still don't understand Mel Zelaya's game plan in Honduras, but it's pretty telling that the ruling regime, who staged a coup to remove Zelaya from office, immediately turned their thoughts to eliminating civil liberties the moment they felt any dissent toward their brazen action. Kind of tells you what kind of people we're dealing with.

The new restrictions, including a ban on non-authorized gatherings and a media clampdown, aimed to protect "the large majority of the Honduran population which is not engaged with groups of violent protesters," according to an announcement on national television.

The restrictions were announced on the eve of mass protests called by Zelaya for Monday, the three-month anniversary of the coup.

Zelaya has been holed up in the Brazilian embassy since his surprise return to the country last week.

The right, which has been praising the coup and chiding the President for "coddling" Zelaya, self-evidently history's greatest monster, will probably find a way to explain away the state-sponsored supression at work here. They always do. As Glenn Greenwald notes in a fantastic post today, they are the kings of moral relativism, having convinced themselves that violating international treaties and suspending laws and dealing in the weapons trade and stealing elections are fine for us and our allies, but reprehensible for those designated enemies of freedom and liberty. To quote Greenwald, "It's the adolescent self-love of believing that 'X, by definition, is good when I do it and bad when you do it.'"