Obama's Double Standard -- Honduras v. Iran

President Obama was decidedly tight-lipped in his initial reactions to the election irregularities and resultant demonstrations in Iran. By contrast, he has come out quite forceful and direct in his opposition to what he – and Hugo Chavez and the United Nations – call the illegal ouster of the president of Honduras, Jose Manuel Zelaya.

Zelaya was quick to notice the unusual reaction by the American president. “The United States has changed a great deal,” he said at the news conference after the U.N. passed a resolution condemning the military’s seizure of power in Honduras. Well, change is what Obama ran on and change is what we’re getting – heaven help us.

Not only did Obama denounce Zelaya’s removal from office, calling it an illegal coup, but he went so far as to call for Zelaya’s reinstatement. This from the president so hesitant to tell other countries what to do lest the U.S. be seen as bullying. Interestingly, he chooses this situation and this leader to support loudly and without reservation.

Zelaya was elected president of Honduras in 2005 and, under that country’s constitution, he was to serve a four year term, ending this year. Instead, he had been pushing for a referendum to eliminate the presidential term limit and allow him to continue as president. He was ousted by the army on June 28 which stormed the presidential palace and took the president from his bed to a plane heading to Costa Rica. Later, the Honduran Congress replaced the exiled president with Roberto Micheletti, the president of Congress.

The Honduran Supreme Court had ruled that the proposed referendum was unconstitutional and the Honduras Congress agreed. With no backing down from President Zelaya, those opposed to his efforts to expand his term organized the ouster.

Zelaya is a socialist who is a close ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua.

The Obama administration had apparently been trying to prevent the constitutional crisis in Honduras from exploding into a military clash, but those efforts failed.

Rather than taking the wait-and-see approach used in Iran, Obama immediately came to defend the ousted president – despite the fact that his removal seemed to have been in an effort to defend democracy and oppose a unilateral grab for power. The newly sworn in president would like the U.S. and the rest of the world to acknowledge that fact.

According to the New York Times, Micheletti has reached out to the world community, explaining that “Mr. Zelaya’s arrest by the army had been under an official arrest warrant based on his flouting of the Constitution.”

“We respect the whole world, and we only ask that they respect us and leave us in peace,” the Times quotes Mr. Micheletti from a radio interview. The Times also indicated that Micheletti confirmed that the “previously scheduled elections called for November would go on as planned.”

It would be nice if our president would at least pay lip service to the idea that the U.S. supports democracy and opposes efforts to silence the will of the people. If, in fact, the proposed constitutional referendum was an unconstitutional, illegal power grab, as their Supreme Court ruled, then perhaps arresting and removing the president was appropriate.

It begs the question why Obama was so quick to denounce the military’s action in Honduras (as “anti-democratic"), while not loudly supporting the pro-democracy protesters in Iran. Curious.

Legalize Online Gambling Now

Sun Tzu said, know thy enemy. For those of us supporting online gambling, we have a number of otherwise incompatible enemies to deal with.

The conservative Christian organization “Focus on the Family” is opposed to any form of online gambling. As they see it, “We must keep families safe from online predators that seek to exploit people for a profit.” To FOTF online gambling is not an issue of personal freedom, relief from excessive governmental interference, or the rights of a free market. It is about sin and degeneracy – and they see it as their moral responsibility to save you from evil.

What is ironic, of course, is that in their quest to shut down online gambling, Focus on the Family is doing the bidding of other purveyors on gambling: the NFL, brick and mortar casinos, Indian gaming, and state lotteries.

On the side of online gambling there is the million plus member Poker Players Alliance (PPA), headed by former Republican Senator Alfonse D’Amato, the Interactive Media and Entertainment Gaming Association (iMEGA), and the Interactive Gaming Council (IGC), among other groups. Their motivation is, primarily, old-fashioned capitalism, the economic outgrowth of freedom and democracy.

Focus on the Family believes it has Jesus on its side and its drive to impose its religious beliefs on others is boundless. And Jesus wasn’t much of a capitalist, anyway.

This coalition of the religiously fervent – who, we know, is tireless, well-organized, and well-funded – with the industries that would be hurt by the expansion or legalization of online gambling makes for a formidable opposition.

Add to this mix liberals such as Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein who incredibly find themselves in the political bed of the rightest of the right in their opposition to online gambling. The Senators are not religious zealots, nor do they seem to be motivated by ties to traditional gambling businesses.

Instead, they take their position from a third category – the liberal “I know what’s best for you” position that makes certain left-wingers believe they have the moral duty to protect you from yourself. And if it interferes with your economic and personal freedom, oh well. They're only looking out for your well being.

Even with a poker player in the White House, we have opposition in the administration – Obama’s Attorney General, responding to questions during his confirmation hearing confirmed his opposition to online gambling. Agents from the Department of Justice recently intercepted payments from online poker sites to players, freezing assets and causing tens of millions of dollars in payments to be suspended.

Strange bedfellows, indeed.

How to combat a motley association such as this one?

We have to be larger, better funded, more organized, and louder.

And, possibly, we need a spokesperson a tad more eloquent, more approachable, and more telegenic than Barney Frank.

We need to frame this as an issue of economic and personal freedom, which it is. We as a country do not ban all forms of activities that might have some negative consequences. We establish rules and guidelines, laws and penalties. We’re not Iran, we don’t need the government telling us what we can and cannot do in the privacy of our own homes, with our own money. If we are the country of freedom, then let us have that freedom.

I don’t want Focus on the Family running my life, nor those who feel economically threatened by online gambling, and certainly not by the self-appointed nannies Boxer and Feinstein. I want the right to spend my free time and my money as I see fit. Is that really too much to ask?

The Hands-Off President

President Obama, during a news conference with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, was asked about the dispute over the Iranian election. He replied, “You know, I take a wait and see approach… It’s not productive, given the history of US- Iranian relations to be seen meddling. The US president, meddling in Iranian elections.”

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the “observer in chief.” So fearful of making the wrong move, he opts instead to do nothing. The leader of the world’s largest and most influential democracy, he won’t even stand up for the basic principles on which the country was founded and by which he was elected.

He says, tepidly at best, that "people's voices should be heard and not suppressed." Way to go out on a limb. He might as well be discussing the mini-controversy surrounding the final voting on American Idol and not a dispute about a sham election in a theocratic country run by Islamic extremists who control every aspect of daily life.

This was an election in name only. No one can run for president who isn’t approved by the Guardian Council which is comprised of six members appointed by the Supreme Leader and six others selected by the Majlis. This Guardian Council ensures that no true reformist candidate ever runs for president as they only approve candidates who are dedicated to Islamic values as they see them.

Regardless of whether Mousavi was, in truth, a “reform” candidate, it is clear that as between him and Ahmadinejad, Mousavi was the lesser of two evils and a more “democratic” candidate.

Mousavi ran on a platform that sounded some familiar democratic themes: to institutionalize social justice, equality and fairness, freedom of expression, and to root out corruption. He supported private ownership of the TV airwaves and moving supervision of the police to the President and away from the Supreme Leader.

Mousavi also took a less hard line on the U.S. and Israel and, unlike his opponent who denies the Holocaust, denounced the killing of Jews.

When it was announced that Ahmadinejad had won – indeed had won in a landslide – the news was disappointing to the West. But when further news started coming out of Iran that pointed to voting irregularities – for example, Mousavi’s home town voting overwhelmingly for his opponent – that was even more troubling for the West.

So how did Obama react to the news that the election may have been a sham? Obama said that he had "deep concerns" about the election and "stands strongly with the universal principle that people's voices should be heard and not suppressed."

He hastened to add, however, that "how that plays out over the next several days and several weeks is something ultimately for the Iranian people to decide."

Not exactly, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” material. No, Obama sounds much more like Jimmy Carter … and we know how well that worked out for U.S. foreign policy.

Before the election, Obama was quick to paint Mousavi’s candidacy as a victory for Obama’s approach in Iran. “We are excited to see what appears to be a robust debate taking place in Iran,” Obama was quoted as saying. “Obviously, after the speech that I made in Cairo, we tried to send a clear message that we think there is the possibility of change.”

“Ultimately, the election is for the Iranians to decide, but just as has been true in Lebanon, what can be true in Iran as well is that you’re seeing people looking at new possibilities,” the president said. “Whoever ends up winning the election in Iran, the fact that there’s been a robust debate hopefully will help advance our ability to engage them in new ways.”

Well, the “robust debate” ended up with the status quo – no change, no reform and a slap on the hand of anyone hoping for any form of democracy in that country. Protests were met harshly and reports are that over twenty protesters have been killed. Communication from Iran to the outside world is being hampered by the government and the foreign media is being limited in what it can show of what is going on there.

Foreign leaders have taken a clear stand against the violence in Iran, with Britain's Gordon Brown saying that the European Union unanimously condemns violence against protesters and the German Prime Minister using similarly straight-forward language in denouncing the attacks on protesters.

This is what the president has said of these recent developments:

“Obviously all of us have been watching the news from Iran. And I want to start off by being very clear that it is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran's leaders will be; that we....respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran, which sometimes the United States can be a handy political football -- or discussions with the United States.

Having said all that, I am deeply troubled by the violence that I've been seeing on television. I think that the democratic process -- free speech, the ability of people to peacefully dissent -- all those are universal values and need to be respected. And whenever I see violence perpetrated on people who are peacefully dissenting, and whenever the American people see that, I think they're, rightfully, troubled.

My understanding is, is that the Iranian government says that they are going to look into irregularities that have taken place. We weren’t on the ground, we did not have observers there, we did not have international observers on hand, so I can't state definitively one way or another what happened with respect to the election.

But what I can say is that there appears to be a sense on the part of people who were so hopeful and so engaged and so committed to democracy who now feel betrayed. And I think it's important that, moving forward, whatever investigations take place are done in a way that is not resulting in bloodshed and is not resulting in people being stifled in expressing their views.

Now, with respect to the United States and our interactions with Iran, I've always believed that as odious as I consider some of President Ahmadinejad's statements, as deep as the differences that exist between the United States and Iran on a range of core issues, that the use of tough, hard-headed diplomacy -- diplomacy with no illusions about Iran and the nature of the differences between our two countries -- is critical when it comes to pursuing a core set of our national security interests, specifically, making sure that we are not seeing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East triggered by Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon; making sure that Iran is not exporting terrorist activity. Those are core interests not just to the United States but I think to a peaceful world in general.

We will continue to pursue a tough, direct dialogue between our two countries, and we'll see where it takes us. But even as we do so, I think it would be wrong for me to be silent about what we've seen on the television over the last few days.

And what I would say to those people who put so much hope and energy and optimism into the political process, I would say to them that the world is watching and inspired by their participation, regardless of what the ultimate outcome of the election was. And they should know that the world is watching.

And particularly to the youth of Iran, I want them to know that we in the United States do not want to make any decisions for the Iranians, but we do believe that the Iranian people and their voices should be heard and respected.”

That's it -- the extent of the U.S. President's interest in Iran is that he'll be watching. He has no opinion, he has no suggestions, he has no requests, he has no preference and little reaction beyond the stalwart "deeply troubled" -- whatever that means.

Obama has perfected the art of saying very little in quite a few words. He is troubled that the election may have been stolen, he is troubled that protesters are being treated harshly, he is troubled that the perception that there was a chance for reform in Iran was just an act. Troubled?

But that's as far as he's willing to go. He's happy to sit back and watch as events unfold. That is not leadership -- that's disengagement.

Obama's VP, known for his lack of self-censorship, said, of Iran, “There's an awful lot of questions about how this election was run." True, Joe, but your president isn’t asking for any answers. He’ll just wait and see. He's no meddler.