S'funny in this hour of Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, and Iraq that perhaps nothing tells us quite so much about the incumbent D.C. administration as its behavior regarding Honduras.

The situation is this:

Three months ago, the Honduran military escorted the country's president, Manuel Zelaya, out of the country in his pajamas. After the fashion of his ideological mentor, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Zelaya had tried to rewrite the constitution to serve a second term - with the anticipated next step of having himself declared president for life. As The Wall Street Journal notes in an editorial:

The (Honduran) constitution strictly prohibits a change in the term-limits provision. On multiple occasions (Zelaya) was warned to desist, and on June 28 the Supreme Court ordered his arrest. Every major Honduran institution supported the move, even members in Congress of his own political party, the Catholic Church, and the country's human rights ombudsman.

A former president took the helm of an interim government. The temporary overseers said they would relinquish power upon the January inauguration of the winner of the November presidential election, whose candidates were selected prior to Zelaya's removal.

THE OBAMA administration joined a multitude of marxian regimes in "the international community" - including those in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, and Argentina - in going ballistic. Jimmy Carter and his election-monitoring Carter Center went nuts. The essential line that all still toe: Zelaya's removal, after time-worn Latin American fashion, violated democratic principles and amounted to a coup by a neo-fascist junta.

President Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, have taken all the predictable steps (deportation, cancellation of aid, freezing of accounts) and have announced they may not recognize the winner of the November election unless Zelaya is reinstalled.

Meanwhile, Zelaya has been secreted back into Honduras, where Brazil has given him sanctuary in its embassy - whence he is (a) directing mobs lobbing Molotov-cocktails, (b) deploring incidents of alleged gassings by "Israeli mercenaries," and (c) demanding his return to power.

ON THIS ONE, there's a lot more going around in the dark besides Santa Claus.

You might think Obamians wouldn't be aiding and abetting Fidelistas (Chavistas in Venezuela, Zelayistas in Honduras) across Latin America - or anywhere - but you would be oh-so-wrong. This administration has dusted off the ideological amendment to the Monroe Doctrine that decrees, pas d'ennemis a gauche - no enemies to the left.

The Monroe Doctrine once held that the U.S. government would suspend its principle of non-intervention in the Western Hemisphere to serve American interests. Numerous post-war administrations modified it to oppose rightist regimes, but rarely leftist. So we have variously isolated or rubbed out individuals such as Somoza in Nicaragua, Stroessner (Paraguay), Trujillo (Dominican Republic), the Duvaliers Papa Doc and Baby Doc (Haiti), and Batista (Cuba) - most of them deemed rightists more or less. Continued...