“Real Time” lawmaker Ros-Lehtinen taking Honduran coup show on the road

by Bill Conroy - October 3,

Republican U.S. Representative's former press secretary helping to write the script

GOP lawmakers Jim DeMint, Aaron Schock, Peter Roskam and Doug Lamborn aren’t the only extremist grandstanders openly flaunting their disrespect for the Logan Act and contempt for President Obama by trekking to Honduras to play dice with a dictator.

This coming Monday, U.S. Rep Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, also is slated to make a trip to Honduras to play footsy with the Despot and Chief of Honduras, Roberto Micheletti, and his putsch pals.

Ros-Lehtinen also has another ally in that endeavor — a former member of her staff who now works for a firm that is actually under contract to Micheletti’s gang of thugs (to the tune of more than a quarter million dollars).

Like South Carolina U.S. Sen. DeMint and company, Ros-Lehtinen
will try to pass off her upcoming trip to Honduras as a mere fact-finding mission. After all, the GOP golpista-backers (GOPistas) are not the first lawmakers to visit a “shunned country,” and the right and wrong of what happened in Honduras is all relative, at least in the "objective" world of mainstream media reporting, as AP reports.

The brief, amicable visit [by DeMint and his fellow GOPistas] with the leaders of the coup highlighted a divide in Washington, where the Obama administration considers the interim government illegitimate and is working to reinstate [democratically elected Honduran President Manuel] Zelaya. Many conservatives, however, side with the government installed after soldiers arrested the president in his pajamas and flew him into exile.

DeMint said before the trip that even calling Zelaya's overthrow a coup is "ill-informed and baseless."

But in a "justice" sense, asserting that the Republican lawmakers’ Honduran trips are mere fact-finding missions, or are of no consequence to President Obama’s policy in the region, seems to be, in DeMint’s own words, an “ill-informed and baseless” claim. DeMint, through arcane Senate rules, is now blocking Obama nominees to Latin American diplomatic posts because he opposes Zelaya and the White House’s public stance supporting his return to the Honduran presidency. DeMint's glad-handing with the dictator Micheletti also only serves to confer credibility on a repressive regime that is already responsible for multiple human rights violations.

In the case of Ros-Lehtinen, the Florida lawmaker’s animosity toward the democratically elected, and deposed, President of Honduras, Zelaya, has already been made clear publicly. So her pending visit to Honduras, likewise, can only be viewed as an effort to undermine the Obama administration’s foreign policy goals in the region.

In late September, Ros-Lehtinen introduced a House Resolution calling on the Obama administration to recognize the “legitimacy” of the upcoming November presidential elections in Honduras, which, as matters stand now, will take place under the repressive rule of the coup government already deemed to be "not legal" by President Obama.

And in July, shortly after the coup, Ros-Lehtinen sent a letter to President Obama chastising him for not muzzling Zelaya — a foreign leader who is now holed up in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

Per a recent ABC report:

"This marked a serious failure in U.S. diplomacy and democracy advocacy," she [Ros-Lehtinen] wrote. "As such, many would argue that the U.S. is complicit in the escalation of the constitutional crisis in Honduras."

And if that isn’t enough evidence to raise doubts about Ros-Lehtinen’s supposed “fact-finding” or otherwise supposed non-obstructionist intentions in Honduras, then there’s this little inconvenient truth about her “ally”: Juan Cortiñas-Garcia, senior vice president of the high-powered Washington, D.C., PR firm Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter & Associates (CLSA).

Cortiñas-Garcia has some history with Ros-Lehtinen. He served previously (for some six years) as Ros-Lehtinen’s press secretary and legislative assistant.

"During that time, he worked on domestic and international affairs issues particularly dealing with U.S. policy toward Latin America," Cortiñas-Garcia's CLSA bio states.

And why is that of significance?

Well, Micheletti and his fellow golpistas recently shelled out some $292,000 to retain Cortiñas-Garcia’s PR firm. Part of CLSA’s mission under that contract is to “build a campaign of persuasion” supporting the interests of the coup regime by engaging in ”policy maker contacts and events, and public dissemination of information to government staff of government officials. …”

It seems Cortiñas-Garcia’s former boss, U.S. Rep. Ros-Lehtinen, fits that bill quite well. Might this be a case of a little coup blood money for a little quid pro quo access?

So, let’s get this straight. Ros-Lehtinen is headed to Honduras next week to help preen the feathers of the leaders of the Honduran coup while at the same time her former press secretary is working under contract with an inside-the-Beltway PR firm to advance the despotic interests of those same coup leaders — all in open defiance of the Obama Administration’s stated policy on Honduras.

Maybe after she returns, Ros-Lehtinen can get HBO to once again pay her way to Los Angeles to appear on the “Real Time with Bill Maher” show — a gig she’s done at least four times since 2005, with the last such trip racking up nearly $2,300 in travel and lodging expenses (including a $750 town car ride), according to Congressional travel records.

And once on the show, maybe Ros-Lehtinen can give CSLA an assist with their coup contract by putting a positive spin (cloaked in humor, of course) on all the golpista-sanctioned democracy she discovered while fact-finding in Honduras.

Oh, and its worth pointing out that Ros-Lehtinen’s former press secretary also has done some work for an HBO affiliate in the past, as his bio on CLSA’s Web site reflects:

Mr. Cortiñas-Garcia has led crisis communications efforts involving legal disputes and complex Latin American transactions for leading corporations such as HBO Latin
America….

So maybe Cortiñas-Garcia could even write the script for Ros-Lehtinen’s next HBO appearance, no?

Stay tuned ….

Fuente: narcosphere.narconews.com

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