The first time I saw the word “coup” in a headline regarding Honduras and the recent arrest/exile of its president, I took it at face value. The initial, sketchy reports of the event made it seem that the legitimately elected president, Mel Zelaya had been forced from office by the military because he pushed for a change in the Honduran constitution to allow him a second term. If that’s not a coup, what is?

But then I read this, by a writer for the Wall Street Journal:

That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite [of the constitution], the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had [Hugo] Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.

The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.

Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court’s order.

The attorney general had already made clear that the referendum was illegal, and he further announced that he would prosecute anyone involved in carrying it out. Yesterday, Mr. Zelaya was arrested by the military and is now in exile in Costa Rica.

Perhaps you’re inclined to dismiss any account from someone employed by the famously right-wing Journal editorial page. If so, here’s a similar observation from Gwynne Dyer, a London journalist who can’t be accused of being reflexively conservative. (One of his books, for instance, begins this way: “It is not enough that the United States lose in Iraq. It must be seen to lose by the American public … “)

Alas, the president of Honduras does not have the right to organize a referendum all by himself, and the country’s Supreme Court ordered him to stop. Congress also condemned the maneuver, but Zelaya plowed ahead regardless. When the army, obedient to the Supreme Court’s orders, refused to help Zelaya run the referendum, he fired the army’s commanding general and got his own party activists to distribute the ballot boxes.

At that point, Congress voted to remove Zelaya because of his “repeated violations of the constitution and the law and disregard of orders and judgments of the institutions,” and the Supreme Court ordered the army to intervene and arrest the president.

All this certainly gives a different flavor to the “coup.” Any reasonable person might conclude that the Honduran president himself, by seeking to sidestep his country’s constitution, Congress and Supreme Court, had attempted a coup. Still, two days ago the New York Times persisted in calling the army’s action a coup, with the only mention of the precipitating events summarized this way:

Mr. Zelaya’s ouster was driven at least in part by fears that a referendum he was planning to amend the Constitution was really a backhanded attempt to extend his stay in power.

If being driven from office for subverting the constitution and ignoring the law is a “coup,” then by the standards of the New York Times, Richard Nixon is a martyr.