Every Player Has Their Tell

This has been a busy week...people are dying for trying to express their opinions in Iran and our president could care less; a coup in Honduras, executed to preserve their fragile constitution, has been swiftly condemned by our president in a show of unity with Daniel Ortega, Hugo Chavez and the Castro brothers; the conservative movement lost the first cap and trade battle in the House, Al Franken was awarded his Senate seat and another celebrity seems to die with each passing day. Whew, that's a lot to process. I think out of all of this the Honduras-Iran comparison tells us a lot more than what's happened on the surface.

Anyone who has any lingering hope that Obama is not a complete leftist need only look at his reactions to world events over the last week to have those hopes crushed. Like a poker player who can't stop smiling when he has four aces, Obama may have unintentionally tipped his hand regarding his real hopes for change in this administration.

While taking a "wait and see" approach to people trying exercise freedom of speech and assembly in Iran (rights we take for granted), he waited until China and Russia - CHINA and RUSSIA!! - spoke against the harsh treatment of protesters before "strongly condemning" the actions.

Yet in Honduras, when the constitution was threatened and a coup was executed to protect it, Obama rallied round the issue with this hemisphere's most notorious dictators to denounce it. Why be so quick to bash one and slow to attack the other? One could postulate what he's thinking:

On Honduras: "Gee, all the president was trying to do was change the constitution so he could continue his rule! What's so bad about that? When I try that I don't want to be arrested and dropped off at the border!"

On Iran: "Gee, all the mullahs are doing is protecting the fraudulent results of a bogus election, and the people are being really unreasonable! I wish we could shut down the internet, arrest people at will and shoot and hang protesters with no repercussions in this country. Why should I condemn them for doing what I don't have the power to do...yet."

But if one were to postulate such thoughts, one would have absolutely no faith in our leader, would one?

Obama has made a career of being sufficiently vague about his beliefs so as to allow people to draw their own conclusions about what his stance on issues really is, and thus far it's worked for him. He'd better develop a real platform of beliefs and make them public soon, or the conclusions people draw will not be to his liking. I don't hold out much hope for that though...in my opinion, he's too concerned about his image to worry about substance or principle. What cards is he holding in this political poker game, and is he a good enough player to win? I guess we'll find out soon enough, but at least now we can see his more of his strategy.