Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
This would make a pretty good working definition of chutzpah:
ROVE: We saw it in Honduras. Where rather than monitoring the situation, they [the Obama administration] let a cowboy president try to act in an extra-constitutional way to violate a fundamental principle in the Constitution, all without having done their homework in advance.
He's blaming Obama for allowing the president of another nation violate the constitution of his own country -- you know, like the man Rove got into office in this nation. Seriously, this is where the media should act more like the Gong Show. Buzzers should go off when someone says something this stupid and hypocritical. Everyone on the set of the show should come on camera, point and laugh at the idiot saying it.
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Maybe Rove is pissed 'cause in Honduras they got away with it. I'm betting Rove wishes the worst President in living memory had been so lucky. Unfortunately Bush the Least was being watched by the (center/leftist) media (a shame he was not stopped before he caused real harm though). - Dingo
Posted by: DingoJack | March 19, 2010 9:39 AM
DingoJack,
Uh, I think you misunderstand the situation if you think 'they' (which should have read Zelaya) got away with acting in an extra-constitutional matter. The Hondurans actually resisted pressure from the Obama administration and acted to prevent constitutional violations that might have led to a new pseudo-democracy in Latin America on the Venezuelan model.
Posted by: JasonTD | March 19, 2010 10:04 AM
I have already promised myself that if I ever would go into politics, I'd take a buzzer into parliament. Every time a speaker would say something stupid or plain wrong, or use a logical fallacy, I'd buzz it.
Also, if I'm going to make parliament into a game show anyway, I'm going to insert a bill to propose that members of parliament can be voted out. Too many text messages against you and you're sent home.
A person can dream, right?
Posted by: Deen | March 19, 2010 10:46 AM
what did bush do that violated the US constitution? just curious. lying to the public isn't proscribed by the law, and the congress did vote to allow him to attack another country. as for violating the Geneva conventions, a treaty agreed to by the US govt, if bush & co did so then why hasn't an international tribunal been set up to examine the charges?
bush and his people acted within the bounds of the US govt and constitution, albeit at the extreme edges of those bounds.
Posted by: andrew | March 19, 2010 10:50 AM
@andrew: Little chance of that ever happening. The US don't even recognize the International Criminal Court in The Hague. In fact, the Bush administration adopted a law that allowed them to invade The Netherlands should an American ever stand trial there.
And it's not just the Geneva conventions that were violated, but also the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which the US also signed.
Posted by: Deen | March 19, 2010 11:37 AM
I'm confused. You're saying Bush's closet case is complaining about some other president acting like a cowboy?
Posted by: Molly, NYC | March 19, 2010 11:57 AM
andrew @ 4:
Unbelievable. First start with all the actions he took that were challenged in court and where he lost. Next read about all the ways he carried out subsequent actions after losing in court that were contra to those SCOTUS rulings.
Next see how he abused signing statements well beyond any other President.
These examples wouldn't even scratch the surface.
Posted by: Michael Heath | March 19, 2010 4:27 PM
You're right it is silly.
But maybe not so silly if you understand that Central and South America has long been seen as a zone of control/influence of the United States. The USA has long felt justified in punishing, rewarding, invading, undermining, subsidizing the nations and/or their governments as the powers that be see fit.
Those who travel in the rarefied air of elite power and control in this nation, Rove fitting this description, have long seen South America as a US play ground where nothing of substance happens without them having their say. This is understood as the way it is and the way it should be.
That is the story behind the US resistance to the Sandinista in Nicaragua and the US organizing, financing and training of 'freedom fighters' intending to overthrow the regime that dared to turn to communism.
This assumed right of the US to screw with, or overthrow, regimes that fail to follow the politics and economic policies we give them explains why Chavez is seen as such an insult. Then again he is being undermined, bound, and marginalized as we speak. He holds on primarily because he has oil and uses it as leverage to maintain his existence. But Chavez is seen as an exception. Oil money excuses a lot of socialism.
Honduras, with no oil or wealth to buy indulgences with, is another matter. That they might flaunt the unwritten imperatives and directives we lay down is cause for alarm. What if other nations we keep under our thumb resisted out control? The fact that these dangerous tendencies were allowed to surface without being immediately countered is seen as a betrayal of the interests of the power elite by Obama.
They are insulted that well developed and all so frequently used mechanisms of leverage and power have not been employed to get them back in line. We could quite easily threaten trade sanctions, shift investments to weaken their economy, finance the opposition party, massage an ambitious general to pose threat of a coup. That Obama is unwilling to use even these trivial mechanisms of power and control to protect the elites, euphemistically known as 'US interests', is clearly a betrayal.
Rove, like other elites, takes it as written that it is their right, by way of wealth and power, to treat them as marionettes. Obama not reflexively slapping them down, allowing them to imagine they are an independent nation, makes the villagers very annoyed.
Posted by: Art | March 19, 2010 8:43 PM
Art,
I'm not sure that I'm following your argument that well, so if I misunderstand it, please correct me.
You seem to be saying that the Obama administration didn't use soft power to try and influence what was happening in Honduras. But this is clearly false. The U.S. suspended all non-emergency, non-immigrant visas, suspended joint military activities, and certain non-humanitarian aid. Had the U.S. officially declared the situation to be a military coup, then the Administration would have been legally required to stop virtually all aid not tied to democracy building.
Honduras was under enormous pressure from both the U.S. and other Latin American countries and stuck to its position. This can be seen either as the country's 'elites' stubbornly clinging to power, but the other view is that they resisted pressure to allow another Chavez to rise up.
For those that didn't follow the details, the crisis was precipitated when the Honduran supreme court ruled that Zelaya's planned referendum on a new constitutional convention was illegal. He then had his supporters seize the ballots, apparently in a plan to go ahead with the referendum anyway. (He had fired the head of the army for refusing to distribute the ballots since the supreme court had ruled the referendum unconstitutional.) A big part of why it was declared illegal is that it is directly prohibited by the Honduran constitution for a president to try and overturn the one term limit. (Zelaya's term expired in January, if I remember correctly.) The constitution even specifically says that even proposing to end the term limit was illegal, and while the constitution could be amended, the term limit was a feature of the constitution which could not be amended. A video of Zelaya stating "The only position in Honduras that cannot be reelected is the president. But, reelection will be a topic of the coming National Constitutional Assembly" appeared days before his arrest.
The proper response would have been for Zelaya to be arrested for trial, rather than exiled. They definitely erred in that respect. But it is clear that Zelaya was no lover or follower of the rule of law.
Posted by: JasonTD | March 19, 2010 10:47 PM
Posted by: Jadehawk | March 20, 2010 4:29 PM
evidence that THAT was what the referendum was about, please! Seriously, it would have been impossible for him to be requesting a second term, considering that the constitutional convention would have happened DURING the election in which his successor would be elected. The constitutional convention is not illegal, but has limited rights. there's no evidence whatsoever that Zelaya was attempting to have the convention happen to change election term limits; that just happens to be the thing that's claimed by the press/the opponents of constitutional amendments every time a South American country attempts this. They tried to claim the same for Evo Morales. it's bull.
Posted by: Jadehawk | March 20, 2010 4:35 PM
Jadehawk,
There. I blockquoted it since you apparently missed it before.
You also seemed to miss the part where the Honduras supreme court ruled that the referendum Zelaya wanted was illegal and where he fired the army general because he wouldn't go against the supreme court and distribute ballots anyway. The supreme court voted 5-0 to have the army chief reinstated, by the way.
I am not arguing that the removal of Zelaya was legal. He should have been tried of the crimes that he was accused of rather than exiled, which was clearly not legal. But it is fairly clear from everything I have read (from multiple news agencies, and no, I don't watch Fox) that Zelaya was on a path to try and make Honduras the same kind of populist pseudo-democracy that his buddy Chavez runs.
Posted by: JasonTD | March 20, 2010 5:53 PM
I'm sorry, JasonTD, I'm not buying that trying to change the constitution should actually be considered. The process can certainly be misused (as Hugo Chavez has done, albeit to the approval of many of his supporters, for whatever good or bad that does), but assuming your quote gives sufficient context to the situation, I fail to see an actionable problem here. In any case, there's seldom been a military coup anywhere in the world that was to the benefit of anyone except connected rich people and oligarchs.
Now if the referendum had gone through and there had been widespread, provable vote fraud, there would be a crime. If Zelaya had lost the referendum and defied the result, there would be a crime. But this to me seems a clear-cut case of conservative elite backlash.
Posted by: Brian X | March 20, 2010 6:34 PM
Brian X,
I'm repeating myself, but the Honduran supreme court ruled that the planned referendum was illegal. It is not up to Zelaya or anyone else to second-guess their legal reasoning and decide to go ahead with the ballot anyway, as he was planning to do. That is what made his actions illegal.
Posted by: JasonTD | March 20, 2010 8:19 PM
Jason:
Conveniently for themselves. It seems to me a constitution that does not allow amendments to certain parts of itself is a severely broken document, and Zelaya was, for whatever reason (good or bad), trying to fix this.
Posted by: Brian X | March 22, 2010 10:27 PM
You need to understand Latin American history to understand why so many of them have explicit term limits in their constitutions and provisions saying that you can't change that. People in Latin American got tired of 'President for Life' being the norm. One thing our country got right early, without it having to be written in (until FDR), is that government needs to be effective without requiring any one particular person to be its leader. If government can't be effective when that one person steps down from power, then that in itself shows that the institutions of government are broken. Democracy cannot thrive in the kind of cult of personality that is fairly common in world history. The way I read the situation, the opposition to Zelaya was trying to prevent him from developing into that kind of figure. Certainly, they also had self-interest in mind as well, but that doesn't invalidate their position. Their concerns were justified, particularly with his close support from Chavez, who is working on buttressing his own cult of personality.
No politician gets to step outside of established legal process in a kind of populist uprising and then claim legitimacy.
Posted by: JasonTD | March 23, 2010 6:02 AM