Handpuppet Theater, the Swine Coup...

Zbigniew Brzezinski
David Ignatius

Barack Obama will soon be traveling to Russia, and the pro and con Russian articles are beginning to show, like the links above. I was going to include John Bolton's screed on how Israel should bomb Iran, but I think I'll wait until he pens one saying its time for France or some other ally to bomb Russia. Or, I'd like to suggest we strap Mr Bolton to one of our own, and rename him Dr. Strangelove...

The NY Times is reporting that the European Union may withdraw all of their embassies in Iran: "Iran risked diplomatic isolation from the European Union, as European officials discussed whether to withdraw the ambassadors of all 27 member nations in a dispute over the detention of the British Embassy’s Iranian personnel.

European diplomats said Wednesday that they had made no formal decision to order their envoys home, but that the measure was an option as the European Union — Iran’s biggest t
Iran arrested nine employees of the British Embassy in Tehran over the weekend, but said it had released all but one of them by Wednesday...
...The Iranian response to the potential European action was bellicose. A high-ranking Iranian military official demanded that the Europeans apologize for interference in Iran’s affairs, which, he said, disqualified European countries from negotiating on Iran’s nuclear program." When asked whom they would end up negotiating with, the bellicose general replied, "We will use handpuppets. Our newly elected president has a few left over..."

Speaking of Handpuppet Theater, here is the lawyer for the Honduran military denying that they had performed a coup d'etat: "A coup is a political move,” the lawyer, Col. Herberth Bayardo Inestroza Membreño, said Tuesday night in an interview. “It requires the armed forces to assume power over the country, which didn’t happen, and it has to break the rule of law, which didn’t happen either.”

Governments around the world have decided differently, labeling Mr. Zelaya’s removal an illegal act and calling for his prompt return to power. On Monday, the day after the coup, President Obama said, “We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras, the democratically elected president there.”

“It was a clean operation,” Colonel Bayardo said, dismissing Mr. Zelaya’s remarks before the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday in which he described the arrest as a brutal coup. “It was a fast operation. It was over in minutes, and there were no injuries, no deaths. We said, ‘Sir, we have a judicial order to detain you.’ We did it with respect.” So, respectfully, you see it wasn't a real coup, it was a pseudo-coup, that just looks and results in the same thing a real coup does... In fact, since the flu has been rampaging throughout South America, we could combine the terms and call it the SWINE COUP...