By Al Giordano

The Oligarch Diaspora shouts, again and again, in its flailing attempt to convince the Honduran people and the world that its coup d’etat was somehow legitimate, “we want democracy!”

Well, here’s a powerful example of the kind of “democracy” they apparently want.

In November of 2008, the voters of San Pedro Sula – with a population of one million, it's the second largest city in Honduras – elected Mayor Rodolfo Padilla Sunseri (right, in the photo above) to be their Liberal Party candidate for mayor, with 63 percent of the vote.

Another candidate in that contest – William Hall Micheletti (left, in the photo above, and doesn't that last name sound familiar?) – garnered just 16 percent, coming in third.

Padilla went on to win the mayoralty.

But when your uncle Roberto Micheletti is the newly installed dictator of your country, coming in third is good enough!

At 11 a.m. this morning, workers and citizens in and near San Pedro Sula City Hall heard gunshots and explosions, while riot police attacked a crowd that was demonstrating outside against the coup. More than 50 citizens were reportedly arrested. And nobody has seen Mayor Padilla ever since.

So who is now “mayor” of the city? Telesur reports: the coup “president’s” nephew, William Hall Micheletti.

Ain’t their version of “democracy” grand?

By Al Giordano

Edgardo Dumas, publisher of the pro-coup daily La Tribuna in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and the country’s former Defense Minister, is saying that he speaks for the Inter American Press Association (IAPA where he sits on one of 13 committees) to claim there is no media censorship under the coup regime in Honduras.

(This would not be the first time that the IAPA and its newspaper owners acted in ways contrary to their stated mission in Latin America.)

Well, of course his newspaper isn’t being censored: It spouts only the authorized propaganda of the coup regime.

Dumas said, in this interview today with W Radio in Bogotá, Colombia:

Dumas: Right now, today, July 2, I don’t see any limit on freedom of the press. The four newspapers are putting out the impartial and true news… No TV or radio station has been interfered with.”

Q. Are you sure that the press is functioning normally today in Honduras?

Dumas: I am absolutely certain... I have no doubt about it.

Q. So the rumors that are coming about censorship aren’t true.

Dumas: They are totally and absolutely false.

Q. You are a representative of the IAPA, no?

Dumas: Yes

Q. And as representative of IAPA you support the coup?

Dumas: I don’t support a coup because there has been no coup…

Q. The cutting of CNN was a coincidence?

Dumas: There were no cuts… right now the press is working independently without any restriction… That CNN is badly informing, I have no doubt… CNN is broadcasting on the payroll of the dictator of Venezuela Hugo Chavez.

Q. It pains me to ask this question. Should a representative of IAPA, who represents journalists like us, take sides in a situation like this?

Dumas: I’m not taking sides. I’m trying to be the most objective and impartial I can be…

Q. Pardon me. You say CNN is at the service of Chavez, isn’t that taking sides?

Dumas: …It is not informing the world of what is happening in this country

Q. Mr. Dumas. Are you saying that as a representative of the IAPA?

Dumas: I am vice president of the committee of Press Freedom of the IAPA in Honduras.

Q. Is what you are saying, has it been consulted with the IAPA or is it your personal opinion?

Dumas: It’s my personal opinion.

="MsoNormal">Q. A vice president…

Dumas: For three years I’ve been informing with the IAPA… about freedom of expression in our country…

Q. It’s clear. For you there is no repression, there has not been a coup, there is no disinformation, what is happening is of total normality, and it is CNN and the international press that is disinforming?

Dumas: Exactly.

Q. Thank you very much, Mr. Dumas.

Every board member of the IAPA must be made to watch these following videos, demonstrating the brutal closure of TV and radio stations under the coup regime in Honduras.

Watch the coup's soldiers taking Channel 36 TV off the air:

Watch the coup's soldiers force Radio Progreso 103.3 FM to cease broadcasting:

That scene is from 10:30 a.m. on Sunday, after the station had reported that a coup d’etat had taken place. Spontaneously, listeners of the station in the nearby neighborhood gathered outside its gates to find out what happened. That turne d into a demonstration in defense of the radio station, with chants of “People! Unite!”

At seven minutes into the video, a radio station employee comes out and says “we’ve decided to stop broadcasting.”

Here’s what happened next:

A radio station employee explains how they were convinced by the soldiers to stop broadcasting. A local citizen then addresses the crowd: “Radio Progreso is the voice of all the people of Progreso…. They are informing us that to avoid confrontations… they have decided to close operations... They are going to close the radio frequency… Radio Progeso asks that the people organize ourselves.”

Then a group of soldiers leaves, heading for one of the various trucks they arrived in, as people yell “get out, get out.”

Even the Miami Herald, publishing from the city where IAPA is based, has reported the true facts about massive media censorship under the coup regime, so the IAPA can’t claim to be unaware of it:

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras -- At the close of the one of this week's nightly news broadcasts, Channel 21 news anchor Indira Raudales made a plea: ``We have a right to information! This can't be happening in the 21st century!''

If Raudales offered more details, viewers did not hear them: the screen briefly went to static.

Her on-air appeal for freedom of the press came as the newly installed Honduran government kept several news outlets closed, detained international reporters, and periodically interrupted the signal of CNN en español.

Reporters for The Associated Press were taken away in military vehicles and Venezuela's Telesur network -- and any other station supportive of toppled president Manuel Zelaya -- are still off the air.

Stations that are broadcasting carry only news friendly to the new government. Several local papers have yet to publish information about Zelaya's international support in neighboring countries.

''They militarized Channel 36, which is owned by me,'' said Esdras López, director of the show, ''Asi se Informa.'' ``They brought more than a battalion -- 22 armed men -- took the channel and said nobody could come in and nobody could come out...

The dishonest statements made by Dumas, in the name of the Interamerican Press Association, are an outrage.

All too typical of so many IAPA member newspapers - it is a trade association for industry owners, after all - they are pro-regime in their own land, and therefore do not provoke the censorship and repression that authentic and independent journalists incur, so they are willing to go to the extreme of lying to cover up repression against the more journalistic competition.

I call upon the IAPA to denounce his statements, correct them through its own public statement, and summarily remove Edgardo Dumas from all positions within the organization.

If you’d like to do the same, here is an online form at its website where you can send them a message.

Or you can call (305) 634-2465.

If you get a response out of IAPA, write me at narconews@gmail.com so we can share it with all.

Update: IAPA executive director Julio Muñoz thanked me for passing along this information, and shortly thereafter sent us this statement:

Complaints of restrictions on the press continue

Miami (July 2, 2009)—The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today repeated its call for full respect for press freedom to the new Honduran authorities. The call came as the organization's ongoing monitoring of the situation in the Central American country compiled complaints from news media and journalists that they are still restricted, intimidated and attacked while they attempt to report.

IAPA President Enrique Santos Calderón declared, “To guarantee to the people their right to receive full information the government should not only cease any limitations on the work of the press but also protect and ensure that all media, no matter what their editorial policies, can work freely and in safety.”

“Freedom of the press and of expression is a shared asset belonging to all within a society,” Santos Calderón stated. “And nobody has the right to claim he has the legal authority to decide what the people or society can or must receive as information.” He cited Principle 1 of the Declaration of Chapultepec, which reads “The exercise of this freedom (of the press) is not something authorities grant, it is an inalienable right of the people.”

The chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio Express-News, Texas, added that “we cannot allow ourselves to be misguided by the existing polarization and permit discrimination against the media, reporters and columnists who might be on one side or the other politically.” He recalled that the basis “of press freedom is plurality and diversity” and that “in this conflict we are seeing that all reporters and editors are being affected in one way or another by the conflicting groups.”

IAPA concern is based on numerous actions and complaints in the wake of last Sunday’s coup d’etat, especially incidents, restrictions and censorship that the broadcast media have been subjected to. Although some television channels have returned to the air following Sunday's suspension, including state-run Canal 8and  privately-owned Canal 6 and Canal 11, there have been complaints about control of the information being put out; international television channel Telesur, meanwhile, remains off the air.

In another offense, correspondents from The Associated Press (Esteban Félix, Nicolás García and two of their assistants) and Telesur (Adriana Sivori, María José Díaz and Larry Sánchez) were arrested on Monday while sending video and photos from a hotel room in the Honduran capital when armed members of the military burst in and took them to the Immigration Service office. They were released after it was found they were in the country legally.

Reporters, photographers and cameramen from various news media have filed complaints of attacks by the Common Crimes Unit of the Attorney General’s Office. Among them were three reporters with the Canal 42program “Entrevistado” (Interviewed) who were attacked on Sunday with sticks and stones by demonstrators yelling insults who then seized and smashed their cameras. A similar situation was reported by Radio Globoin Tegucigalpa, from where journalists were temporarily taken to the local Attorney General’s Office, whileRadio Progreso in El Progreso, Yoro province, was “invaded by a contingent of around 25 soldiers” according to a press release issued by the station.

Another TV station not allowed to broadcast was Canal 66 Maya TV. In statements to the San Pedro Sula newspaper Tiempo, Eduardo Maldonado, a former presidential candidate and host of the radio and television program “Hable como Habla” (Say What You Will), reported that on Sunday “They shut us down and locked us out, saying it was on orders.” He added that although broadcasts were resumed on Monday “We didn’t put out full information, only the official line.”

 

Print media, while less hindered in its efforts to report the news in both its print editions and its online versions, was nonetheless not exempt from restrictions and hostility by the warring groups. Some editors, after receiving constant threats against themselves and their journalists -- in their newsrooms and in cell phone messages -- have decided to protect their families by moving them out of their hometowns or out of the country.

Among other developments, the San Pedro Sula newspaper La Prensa reported that on Monday a mob threw sticks and stones at the front of its building and painted slogans in support of ousted President Manuel Zelaya. News photographer Juan Ramon Sosa of La Tribuna was beaten up, insulted and had his camera taken by members of the federal police in Tegucigalpa while covering a demonstration. Meanwhile, several newspapers saw their distribution facilities damaged, from vending kiosks to delivery trucks.

Carlos Mauricio Flores, editor of the Tegucigalpa daily paper El Heraldo, confirmed to the IAPA that its reporters have received phone threats and he also revealed that last Saturday (June 27) “a self-styled People’s  Commando sent to several e-mail addresses a message with degrading photos and text about at least eight journalists from independent media and called on the public to punish them.”

On a final note, the IAPA officers pointed out that many of the attacks on the Honduran press, especially those encouraged by the government, have been criticized by the organization for years now. It cited, in particular, discrimination in the placement of official advertising and the use of state resources to reward or punish journalists, as well as payments to reporters, the constant damaging remarks made about journalists and media by senior officials, the use of public media outlets as organs of propaganda, and the limitation and manipulation of official information.

In recent years a number of Honduran journalists have been forced to leave the country and there is still a high level of impunity in the unsolved cases of the murders of two journalists and two news media consultants.

That's quite the opposite version of events as that forwarded by Mr. Dumas.

IAPA made no direct comment in response to my questions about his standing to make such statements for the organization.

By Al Giordano

Despite the best efforts of what I call "the Oligarch Diaspora" to flood the Internet with near identical messages that the Honduran coup "is not a coup" and that was a "constitutional succession" (cough, cough) dressed in the blue-and-white flag of Honduran democracy, the coup regime bared its fangs today. And like any vampire, it's coming out at nightfall.

The same Congress that, after the military had kidnapped, beaten and dumped President Manuel Zelaya in Costa Rica had declared one of its own, Roberto Micheletti as the coup "president" today passed an emergency law stripping Hondurans of the following rights from the country's constitution:

1. The right to protest.

2. Freedom in one's home from unwarranted search, seizure and arrest.

3. Freedom of association.

4. Guarantees of rights of due process while under arrest.

5. Freedom of transit in the country.

Tomorrow morning's papers are already out across the ocean in Europe, and correspondent Pablo Ordaz of the Madrid daily El Pais has reported from Tegucigalpa about the Coup Congress' decree:

"Minute by minute, step by step, Honduras moves farther from its freedoms..."

Read the defenders of the coup and they are united by one powerful feeling: fear. They're afraid of the growing demonstrations in the streets, like the in the capital city this afternoon captured in the video above, where despite the brutal repressions against the people, each day the opposition crowds grow larger, more emboldened, and better organized. In the defiant but smiling faces of the Hondurans opposing the coup you can see the palpable difference between their passion and the lack of it from the passive bumps on a log that attended yesterday's pro coup rally.

The Congressional decree specified that only at night may those five freedoms be disappeared. And so tonight, a new reign of terror begins.

The coup defenders are afraid, they say, of Honduras becoming another another Cuba, or Venezuela, or Nicaragua, of losing their "freedoms" and their "democracy." But today, in one fell swoop their leaders erased those very freedoms, atop all the other ones they've already burned alive - freedom of the press, freedom to elect their own president, among them - and buried democracy with it.

For democracy is not possible unless a people has freedom to protest, freedom from unwarranted invasion of their homes, freedom of association, rights of due process under law, and freedom of travel in its own country.

That's over now, and will be as long as the coup regime remains in power.

The Oligarch Diaspora will not likely blink, comforting themselves with the Kool-Aid that this attack on civil rights and freedoms is not (well, not yet) aimed at them, but, rather, at "those people," the workers, the poor, the farmers, the indigenous, the rebel students and youth, their social organizations, organizer priests, defense attorneys, human rights observers and authentic journalists, the ones that want their democracy back so much that they risk life and limb now each time they say it.

The Oligarch Diaspora will continue spamming the Internet with their hysterical claims that the rest of the world "just doesn't understand," that the coup was "legal" (attorney Alberto Valiente Thorensen made mincemeat of that claim today), that they represent a majority (unsaid is that they are afraid to let that majority vote on a non-binding referendum, revealing that even they know they are not), that "Honduras wants the coup." But if the opposition were so small would the Coup Congress really have needed to enact the State of Siege and its repeal of those five basic freedoms?

The Oligarch Diaspora - and hey, Larry Birns (yes, you to whom I sent that memo on Sunday) didn't you and your organization COHA find out the hard way this week how they swarm and leech upon NGOs and media organizations to spread their falsehoods, causing your organization to have to issue another embarrassed "clarification"? - will continue to deceive the gullible into thinking they're really of democratic and freedom-loving tendencies.

But what they don't tell you is that they don't want those freedoms for all Hondurans, just for the ones with money and property and political power and privilege: themselves. The rest must be subordinated to them and controlled, by force if necessary.

And so today, Honduras said goodbye to the following articles of its Constitution:

Article 69: "A persons liberty is inviolable and can only be restricted or suspended temporarily through process of law."

Article 71: "No person can be arrested nor kept incommunicado for more than 24 hours without being placed before a competent authority to be judged. Judicial detention during an investigation must not exceed six consecutive days from the moment that the same is ordered."

Article 78: "Freedoms of association and meeting are always guaranteed when they are not contrary to public order and good customs.

Article 79: "All persons have the right to meet with others, peacefully and without weapons, in public demonstration or transitory assembly, in relation to their common interests of any type, without necessity of notice or special permission."

Article 81: "All persons have the right to circulate freely, leave, enter, and remain in national territory. No one can be obligated to change home or residence except in special cases and with those requirements that the Law establishes."

The Oligarch Diaspora says that the democratically elected president was removed by force because he supposedly "violated the Constitution" by proposing a nonbinding referendum to ask all Hondurans if they wanted the chance to vote about whether they wanted to rewrite it through a Constitutional Convention.

But the coup leaders the Oligarch Diaspora defends just rewrote that same constitution today without any formal process of consulting the people at all.

They claim they're fighting for their constitution, but they just ripped it apart.

Gone. All gone. Everything they claim to be defending is gone now, destroyed and in tatters at the hands of the very political class that claimed it was protecting them.

And now, with the Congress' invitation to enter the people's door, the vampires begin to come out... tonight.

By Al Giordano

This is verbatim from today’s press briefing by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs:

Q    What's the White House's sense of the situation in Honduras at this point?  Are we on the cusp of a true meltdown?  It seems to be spiraling.

MR. GIBBS:  Well, I think it's best for me to characterize what actions have happened here.  Assistant Secretary Tom Shannon, who deals with the Western Hemisphere at the Department of State, and Dan Restrepo from the National Security Council, met yesterday at the OAS with President Zelaya.  I think you've seen the OAS take some actions and set some deadlines for the restoration of President Zelaya before actions kick in, and I think that's where we are.

Q But with the Pentagon suspending joint military operations, how far-reaching is that and are there next steps that are under consideration as well?

MR. GIBBS:  Well, we continue to monitor the situation and will respond accordingly as events transpire.  But, again, as I said, we're watching closely what's going on.

(Bold type added for emphasis.)

And also:

Q    On Honduras?  Just to clarify, Micheletti, the (inaudible) President has said that he's planning to send some representatives to Washington to talk with the U.S. government.  Is the White House or the State Department planning to talk with them?

MR. GIBBS:  Not that I'm aware of, no.

Q    Micheletti has also said that if Zelaya returns to Honduras, he's going to be put in jail.  Do you have any comments to that?

MR. GIBBS:  No, except I think, again, I would simply reiterate that I think the OAS has laid down some fairly strong conditions and a timeline that we're supportive of and think that should be met in order to restore the democratic rule of law.

The Organization of American States (OAS), which has unanimously demanded the reinstatement of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya within 72 hours or it will expel Honduras from the organization, is attempting various diplomatic overtures to convince the coup plotters that it will not be in their best interests to continue holding Honduras' democracy hostage.

The US has been part of the formulation of that position (along with Venezuela, Brazil, the Central American nations and other leading players) and its clear that Washington is following the lead of the collective will of the hemisphere.

Those that complain that Washington isn't acting fast enough or forceful enough are really just asking that the US go back to disregarding the will of the rest of the hemisphere and taking a "cowboy" approach all its own. Clearly, the US is the biggest gun in all of this, measured by military and economic might. One would think that everybody that has worked for years to see that power reined in and become more respectful of the rest of the hemisphere would be cheering this development. Well, the serious ones are.

Meanwhile, US Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, today told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell:

"This administration has been very clear that a coup is a coup. And there are no good coups and bad coups."

If you want to argue about whether the US administration is moving fast enough or forcefully enough, talk to me after this weekend, when the 72 hour deadline "kicks in." Debating it before then is an utter waste of everybody's time, because the OAS has already dictated the timeline. If you don't agree, I'll be happy to discuss it after the deadline expires. Or take it up with the OAS, if you can get it to give you the time of day while it's so busy with this crisis. Otherwise, you can always go start a fight with yourself in an empty room. I know that some folks would rather do that than, say, join in the heavy lifting of breaking the coup's information blockade.

Meanwhile there are more updates and links from the front page of Narco News - Laura Carlsen's interview with Honduran social leader Rafael Alegria, the news from the Pentagon about shutting down all joint exercises with the Honduran military, translated texts of recent resolutions by the United Nations and Honduran social movements, and a link to a must-read legal analysis that explains why the coup-defenders' claims that President Zelaya violated the law are false - and we continue to report 'round the clock on new developments.

By Al Giordano

Andrew Sullivan has asked aloud for English-writing bloggers from Honduras to send him their reports. Sadly, what he’ll likely get is a mountain of the upper-class “oligarch diaspora” propaganda from those that are the overwhelming majority of that small minority of folks that speak English in or around Honduras. With the state of siege underway in Honduras, they’re making up every falsehood possible to defend an indefensible coup d’etat. We've beat these types when they've tried it before: reason and fact will prevail again. An all-out information war has exploded on the Internet. So if you’re able to translate important reports from Spanish and send them to Andrew, the very widely read blogger who does have good in him, maybe you can help unspin the propaganda. CC me on your missives if you like.

A lot of it will be from Honduran equivalents of disgraced professional simulator Francisco Toro, the Venezuelan 2002 coup supporter who wrote a decrepitly dishonest essay published by The New Republic today about Honduras. The cockroaches are coming out of the woodwork. Sunlight, now as ever, will be our disinfectant! In 2003, when Narco News was exposing Toro’s undisclosed conflicts-of-interest as a member of the Venezuelan opposition while writing for the New York Times, he abruptly resigned after just one month as a Timesman. Now that there’s a coup to support in Honduras, he’s baaaaaack. Memo to The New Republic: Did Toro disclose his history of undisclosed conflicts of interest when submitting that embarrassingly pro-coup screed?

Today in Honduras, various important things happened. The illegitimate “president,” Roberto Micheletti, convened a rally (see photo above) where he stood side by side with the military general that led the violent coup. So much for the spin that the generals handed over the reins to civilian authorities: the coup has expanded their power vastly. The pro-coup event generated a decent sized – but not all that impressive considering all the power at its command - crowd. Employees of pro-coup businesses were forced to attend, and bussed in. Anyone who saw it on TV could tell it was not grassroots, but Astroturf: they had clean little Honduran flags and very few homemade signs. And compare the lily white gang on that stage with any other photo of the Honduran population! It was the "escualidos" all over again, Honduras chapter.

Meanwhile, watch this video of what his troops were doing to the media while he launched his campaign to deny that he had committed a coup:

You don’t need to speak Spanish to “get” the gist of it. (And if you understand just some Spanish, these are radio guys and gals: they speak very clearly and coherently.) Just watch the body language of the reporters describing the beatings they got and the positions the soldiers forced them into while they destroyed Honduras’ biggest radio chain Globo’s transmitter and took them off the air.

Members of the media: When you defend or make apologies or excuses for this coup, you are enabling that level of violence and repression against media workers just like you.

Later, Dictator-for-Three-Days Micheletti called a “cadena nacional,” decreeing that all TV stations in the country would broadcast his second speech of the day live. There, he announced that the military curfew – initially said to be just for two nights – will now be extended for five more nights, that no Honduran may leave his or her home from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. this week.

He sent his attorney general on a TV tour to announce that the coup government had compiled 18 charges against President Zelaya – including treason, for, get this, wanting to reform the Constitution – and that if Zelaya makes good on his pledge to return to Honduras on Thursday he will be arrested “the moment he steps on Honduran soil.”

That was followed by another “cadena nacional,” this time with the president of the Supreme Court offering legal imprimatur for the illegal coup d’etat.

Meanwhile, here are some translations of Twitter messages from Honduras by others who watched Day Three of this travesty unfold:

Looking at the coup’s charges against Zelaya, tomorrow they’ll blame him for climate change, AIDS and hunger in the world.

Commerce is blocked in #Honduras. Will the businessmen unite to pressure for the return of Zelaya to avoid more losses?

The Facebook page of Manuel Zelaya can be read; Roberto Micheletti just wants your “estado” (in Spanish, “estado” is the same word for “status” as for “state”)

Honduras - How to bypass Internet blocking ... - http://www.r.ieves.com/a1.aspx

Look at this video with images that COWARDLY JOURNALISTS would never dare show you http://bit.ly/4oOXaU

Excellent photo gallery showing the repression by the military coup http://tinyurl.com/mx3mdz

In these moments #Honduras has reinstituted the signal of CNN in exchange that it read letters of support for the coup. TeleSur, to the contrary, remains censored.

CNN interviews the attorney general of #Honduras. Really, in seriousness, I ask: How did these guys that are such imbeciles succeed in a coup. Gorillas!

“From what I know there has not been one death, not one arrest,” says the attorney general of #Honduras. Clearly he’s lying in the face of the evidence.

The attorney general of #Honduras doesn’t know how to expl ain why Zelaya now faces criminal charges after they first exiled him to another country. A pathetic cabinet…

#Honduras must question what is the benefit of having an Army in a poor country. It seems that it only serves for coups d’etat.

Micheletti: "Cuban doctors will recieve hospitality and are welcome to stay."

Micheletti: “Thank you for your support. I will lower the minimum wage, maintain the curfew and I won’t let the impoverished hoardes bother your luxury automobiles.”

What was the point of that last “cadena”?

President of the Supreme Court is now on “cadena nacional”

Honduras - How to send an anonymous email ... - http://www.r.ieves.com/b1.aspx

The World Bank and the Interamerican Development Bank have suspended their loans and credits to #Honduras

We already have the UN, the OAS, SICA, ALBA, World Bank, Interamerican Bank, and PetroCaribe, among many… who is still missing from those that refuse and repudate the coup?

More news is still coming in tonight. Our team is working around the clock. Stay alert and keep refreshing our front page and also here for the next updates being written up right now...

By Al Giordano

Hat tip to Gawker, which narrates:

Surely you're wondering what Glenn Beck was up to tonight, no? Oh, the usual, you know, insinuating that Barack Obama is a communist dictator because he condemned the military coup in Honduras, just like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez did.

No, seriously, that's Glenn Beck logic in action for you. It really is as simple as this—A) FIdel Castro condemned the coup in Honduras. B) Hugo Chavez condemned the coup in Honduras. C) Barack Obama condemned the coup in Honduras. Therefore, Barack Obama is a communist dictator just like Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro.

And now you know.

Everyone knows that Fox News’ Glenn Beck is a TV clown. Probably Beck even knows it. In pursuit of ratings, anything goes; crying, screaming, pouting, whatever works to gain and keep the attention of the slow class. But what’s interesting is that pundits who consider themselves “serious” people suffer from the same twisted logic as appears in that video.

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer launched into this tirade on Fox News yesterday:

On Chávez, Krauthammer says: “Yes he was elected, but Hitler was as well, and Chávez also was elected.” Krauthammer also calls the coup "preferable" to letting Honduras' elected president remain in office. “Look, a rule of thumb here is whenever you find yourself on the side of Hugo Chávez, Daniel Ortega and the Castro twins, you ought to reexamine your assumptions."

That’s Krauthammer's “rule.” Let’s extend it: former armed insurgents (Ortega and Chávez) abandoned the violent path to change opting to participate in peaceful elections instead. Following Krauthammer’s “rule,” we ought to reexamine our belief in peaceful and democratic paths to change and go back to our all-American guerrilla roots (something that clown Glenn Beck has actually suggested on multiple occasions in his flirtations with right-wing militia movements and other such tea-bagging rhetoric).

Similarly, each of those leaders cited by Krauthammer provides low cost oil to poor citizens. Under “Krauthammer’s Law” we must certainly be for jacking up the price of home heating oil on poor and working people, simply because his obsessed-upon leaders do the opposite.

Each of those leaders condemned the war in Iraq long before the American people came around to the same point of view. They were right about that, and most people know that now. Well, Krauthammer’s Law, in this case, at least makes him consistent: he’s one of the last US pundits that wishes the war would be escalated and carried on permanently.

It is simply retarded to allow others to determine where one stands simply by always taking the reactive position: “If he’s for it, we must be against it.” Fortunately, most humans have evolved beyond that stage of the reptilian brain. It’s apparently going to take the Krauthammers more generations of breeding to catch up, I guess.

Right-wing columnist Mona Charen purports to pen a column on Honduras, which ends up being a screed about Venezuela’s Chávez in five of its six paragraphs. Her arguments in favor of the coup d’etat? That Honduras' elected president Manuel Zelaya is “a Hugo Chavez acolyte,” that Chávez is “a good teacher,” that Chávez’s words could come from “Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, or Joseph Stalin,” and that “Chavez might end his days the way Benito Mussolini did.”

“When Barack Obama was asked about the book Chavez handed him last April, ‘Open Veins of Latin America,’ the president said he hadn't read it,” Charen concludes. “Now I'm not so sure.”

We can now add reading any book recommended by Hugo Chávez to the CDS crowd’s list of verboten and tyrannical activities.

Mary Anastasia O’Grady of the Wall Street Journal – who, in 2002, was a staunch supporter of the attempted military coup in Venezuela (her anti-democracy credentials are well polished) – is virtual mother lode of much Chávez Derangement Syndrome. Her column on Honduras this week began with two words: “Hugo Chávez.” She loves the Honduran coup because she sees it as “a setback” for Chávez. In other words, Honduras should be told what it can and can’t do based on how she thinks it will help or hurt the elected leader of a different country.

Still, she seems to know the jig is up on her beloved coup plotters: “It will be a miracle if Honduran patriots can hold their ground.”

Got it? Violent military coup plotters who destroy TV and radio stations, cut down Internet access, and arrest reporters are “patriots” in the whacky jack-booted world of O’Grady.

Matt Drudge - always looking to pander to the nuttiest common denominator - is also in on the CDS act, as can be seen from this recent headline:

Chávez Derangement Syndrome isn’t restricted to the right side of the dial in US punditry and commentary. The corporate media has done a splendid brainwash job on many self-proclaimed “progressives” too.

Yesterday, when a DKos blogger with the handle of liberalminded posted an even-handed and thoughtful diary – A Daily Kos Primer on Hugo Chavez, Pt. 1 – he was subjected to comments like these:

Chavez, who uses and abuses the power of the state to destroy all opposition, is democratic?

(It’s not clear where that commenter gets his disinformation: If “destroy all opposition” is what Chavez is doing, he’s done it without putting a single political prisoner behind bars, to the forgiving extreme that even those generals and industrialists that engineered his kidnapping in 2002 are walking free in Venezuela. He never prosecuted any of them for a crime that had they done it in, say, the United States, they’d be in maximum security prison today, two cell doors down from the Unabomber. But sufferers of CDS never let the facts get in the way of their screeching undocumented claims. They seem to know that with the US corporate media spin at their sails, simply to repeat a big lie is to increase others' unfounded belief in it.)

The Chávez Derangement Syndrom was in full display at DKos on Saturday night when diarist TheSocialNavigator posted this grand example of disinfo: Venezuelan Troops Land in Honduras? (The question mark was something he only added after some cooler minds asked him to please document his fantastic claim.)

Obviously, the whole world knows, three days later, that Venezuelan troops did not land in Honduras. But claims like that do regularly bring the crazies out. Another DKos commentator replied, “Chavez is almost as clinically insane as Kim Jong Il.”

One of the most vehement CDS-sufferers on DKos goes by the handle of Deaniac20. If there is a diary or comment that mentions Chávez, he and a small group of the obsessed rush in to drool their unsubstantiated slogans. To the false news about a Venezuelan military invasion of Honduras, he wrote: “not only does he support Ahamdinejad, but he is launching another Central American war. Haven't there been enough of those in the last 30 years? I thought he was against ‘imperialism.’”

Of course, typical of the CDS afflicted, he didn’t correct his claim about "another Central American war" later on. When asked to correct his repeat of the big lie, he harrumphed: “no, I will call out tyranny whenever I see it.”

Like fellow sufferers of CDS, he’ll never be able to document that what he calls “tyranny” is tyranny. He never even tries. But that doesn’t stop the CDS patients from trying to hijack any discussion on Venezuela – and now, on a coup in Honduras – by making it about a leader that is separated from Honduras geographically by four countries (Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica and Nicaragua) and a Caribbean sea.

Usually, when I get into these discussions with some colleagues on the left who are uneasy with Chávez it becomes immediately clear that they haven’t visited Venezuela (I've reported from there extensively), and they know little-to-nothing about how brutally authoritarian the country was before Chávez was first elected in 1998. Prior to then, there was daily government censorship of newspapers, a 1989 massacre that assassinated as many as 3,000 peaceful protesters, and large numbers of political prisoners in the country's jails. But since 1998, Venezuelan newspapers, including many vehement opposition dailies, publish without censorship (Chávez eliminated the government office dedicated to that task), protesters are allowed to march freely against the government and there are zero political prisoners in the country. Those, to me, are pretty clear markers of greater freedom. What it comes down to, if you question them and listen to them, is that they are uncomfortable by his military background and by his working-class charisma. That’s pretty thin gruel on which to base claims of “dictatorship” or “authoritarian” tendencies.

Chávez, outspoken to a fault, doesn’t always help the situation (as recently when he unconditionally backed his fellow OPEC leader Ahmadinejad in Iran) but when it comes to policies and actions that the Venezuelan president does have power over – those in Venezuela – he’s a shining democrat and civil libertarian compared to every previous Venezuelan president, and he has advanced his country in the direction of greater liberties, not fewer. CDS sufferers are unwilling or incapable of making a comparison between Venezuela under Chávez and Venezuela before he arrived.

I was recently at a seminar in Boston and during the Q & A session I mentioned that, “there are zero political prisoners in Venezuela.” Three or four people there snapped their heads around and yelled, “that’s not true!”

“Oh, yeah?” I replied. “Name one!”

Their heads fell and they looked away in silence. It was clear that they had no idea but simply presumed it to be the case because of how they have been conditioned to view Venezuela and Chávez by a very distorting corporate media lens and the shenanigans of some “human rights” simulators like the serially dishonest grandstander Jose Vivanco of Human Rights Watch.

Part of the problem comes from the reach of the “oligarch diaspora” in the United States: typically, if an English-speaking person knows only one or two Latin Americans, they are typically English-speaking members of an upper class – the kind that US immigration authorities do allow in the country – that come from a very calcified and gated culture; one that fears and resents the rise of center-left democracies in the hemisphere with great irrationality. Many weak minded North Americans tend to take what one or two friends say as gospel and when combined with ratifying corporate media coverage they lose all ability to question their underlying assumptions and gullibilities.

A poster boy for the Latin American elite (indeed, he has made a career out of it) is the prominent “junior,” Alvaro Vargas Llosa. Note that he eliminated his mother’s last name from his own in order to be known as the son of the famed literary author. His column in today’s New York Times – purportedly about Honduras – is titled: The Winner Is Chávez.

Um, hello? I thought we were talking about a coup d'etat and a lot of violence that is happening right now in Honduras.

The junior Vargas Llosa laments:

“The coup leaders, who were trying to prevent Mr. Chávez from bringing Honduras into his fold, may end up giving him more strength in the region.”

In other words, Chávez has become a psychological place marker (much like Iran, in different ideological circles) for the fallen Soviet: the Cold War superpower around which all US policy was reactive. It’s a desperate and silly psychology, since Venezuela, a country of 23 million people (smaller than California) is not by any measuring stick a superpower on that scale, and it’s military is a fraction of the size of that in the US.

Reasonable people can agree to disagree on how favorably or negatively they view Chávez, but when he becomes an obsession, the determinative factor on viewing events in other lands, that’s just plain crazy. It is Glenn Beck crazy. And today, regarding a different country, Honduras, Chávez Derangement Syndrome is being manipulated to justify a bloody coup d’etat.

Update: The United Nations General Assembly has just passed a unanimous resolution condemning the coup in Honduras and demanding the return of President Manuel Zelaya to the post the people elected him to hold.