The Christian Science Monitor's recent report on how the Honduras circus is dividing Congress is worth reading in full, but there are a few passages worth excerpting here. There's this:
"There's a time-honored history of members of Congress turning to Latin America to play out their ideological differences with each other and with the White House," says Daniel Erikson, senior associate for US policy at the Center for Inter-American Dialogue in Washington. "It's an easy place to play politics from the perspective of Congress because it's not seen as an area of vital national security interest, as Afghanistan or the Middle East or Asia would be."
And this:
In Washington, fallout from the Honduran crisis is piling up. Presidential diplomatic appointments are being held hostage; one Democratic senator tried to block a Republican colleague from visiting Honduras; and the State Department - suspected in parts of Latin America of actually supporting the military action against Mr. Zelaya - faces renewed questions about the US stance on Central America's most serious political crisis in at least a decade.
And this:
DeMint, like a number of conservative Republicans, says Zelaya was legitimately removed from office as he plotted a takeover in the image of Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chávez. He faults both nominees for, "like the Obama administration, defending the unconstitutional strong-arm tactics of Zelaya."
Never mind the left's continuing (and incorrect) insistence that the State Department somehow supports Micheletti; what this report from the Christian Science Monitor tells us, quite baldly, is this: US Republicans are still determined to look at Latin America (at the very least) in Cold War lenses while the Democrats still have not figured out how to convince them that the Cold War is, in fact, over.
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