“Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, removed from office Sunday in a military-led coup, addressed the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Tuesday and said he would fly back to Honduras on Thursday, accompanied by the head of the Organization of American States.”—
Showdown Looms in Honduras: Rival Vows to Arrest Ousted President on His Return
Why the hell is the media calling what happened in Honduras a “military-led coup”? The president was breaking the law. His own Attorney General said so. The Congress said so. So did the Supreme Court. Someone had to force him out, and it would seem that only the military had the actual ability to do so.
I don’t get it.
(via mikehudack)Mike, the reason they call it a coup is because it was the military that ousted him (albeit with the full support of congress and the supreme court). The fact that Zelaya was trying to pull a Chavez is lost on the US media. Because the liberal media thinks the military is inherently evil or something like that, I dunno; ask Peter Feld.
Or maybe because the liberal media, you know, understands language. Gah, a quote from Wikipedia since I can’t get Tumblr to parse graves (or is that acutes?)
Linguistically, coup d’état denotes a “stroke of state” (French: coup [stroke] d’ [of] État [state]).[1] Analogously, the looser, quotidian usage means “gaining advantage on a rival”, (intelligence coup, boardroom coup). Politically, a coup d’état is (usually) violent political engineering, yet, is different from a revolution that effects radical change to the government (who rules), not to the form of the government (the political system). Tactically, a coup d’état involves control, by an active, minority of military usurpers, who block the remaining (non-participant) military’s possible defence of the attacked government, by either capturing or expelling the politico-military leaders, and seizing physical control of the country’s key government offices, communications media, and infrastructure.
