Randomly Noted

Brazil’s leftist president is admirable in many ways but his recent comments about Iran and Honduras are an embarrassment. Today, for example, Lula condemned the Honduras elections which brought a conservative politician to power on Sunday. But when pressed on the point, he refused to criticize the Iranian elections whose legitimacy remains in question and which spurred unprecedented popular protests that were brutally suppressed by the “elected” leaders. Lula, it seems, is happy to embrace Iran’s establishment despite its despotic tendencies. Yet when Honduran voters speak with their ballots, well, it’s illegitimate! “Those are two totally different things,” Lula told reporters during a summit meeting in Portugal. “The president of Iran ran for election and got 72% of the vote. You can have questions regarding the opposition speeches, but it was an election within rules that didn’t break the country’s constitution. You can’t compare that to Honduras where someone organized a coup that was rejected by all countries of the world.” It’s astonishing t0 think that the president of Brazil would give Iran’s religious and political bosses credit for adhering to some constitutional ideal while conveniently forgetting that Honduras’s incumbent president was poised to implement unconstitutional plans in defiance of that country’s court system – before the coup leaders stepped in. Lula’s pro-Iran positioning was on stark display last week when he embraced Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was touring Latin America. Lula’s Chavez-esque posturing is beneath him – and Brazil.