Am I missing something here. The Supreme Court of Honduras decided a case against the possibility of a referendum allowing President Zelaya to run again despite his term limit and the president in response called for the referendum anyway.

So, is it a coup if a president is ousted because he violates the law or should it instead be considered a coup when the act of contravening the law is committed by the president?

I think it is unwise to move so quickly in labeling his removal as a typical Latin American coup particularly given the fact he appears to have been lawfully removed by their congress, which is the elected body closest to the people. That said, I do think appears that the process of removing Zelaya was also a bit hasty; such things should be done slowly and judiciously for the obvious reasons we are seeing played out now. It is nevertheless not undemocratic if institutions and laws are followed by elected officials put there to uphold them. In both cases, it may be in the interest of the United States to support Zelaya’s ouster, if things have been legally done, as it now appears. If anything is typical or reminiscent of the old Banana Republic way of doing things, it is a strong-arm president disregarding the rule of law to promote his own interests, especially in an effort to hold on to power, and the possibly hasty, though perhaps correct decision to oust him.

So it begs the question: is it the rule of law Obama, Chavez, Castro, et al are so worked up about in this age of the revanchist central state power, a matter of leftwing politics or is it simply an issue of protecting their own. By the latter I mean, is it simply a sense of brotherhood among these executives that motivates Obama and his friends. In any case, it would seem to me based on the data I can see that the Honduran Congress acted in accordance with the law as the representatives of the people, and world leaders are worked into a froth because they themselves either have guilty minds or are simply afraid of losing some of their power to the legislatures in their home countries.

No matter how one looks at this objectively, it seems anything right now but cut and dried.