Over the weekend the democratically elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, was taken out of power by the military. The AP article that first announced that ousting wouldn't actually call it a coup, and instead only said that the Zelaya was "calling it" a coup. The first sentence in the article also made the point of announcing that Zelaya was an ally of Hugo Chavez, as if that made it ok. So we knew from the beginning that this was going to be a weird one. The Obama administration has denounced the takeover but is also refusing to call it a coup.

A website called BoRev.net (found via Digby) has compiled the weirdest of the coup-deniers and made a contest out of it. You can go there to vote for your favorite, but they're all pretty warped.

• Candidate 1: Interim dictator Roberto Micheletti describes how he found himself in this new role: "I did not reach this position because of a coup. I am here because of an absolutely legal transition process."
• Candidate 2: The WSJ's Mary Anastacia O'Grady describes the military overthrow as all part of a country's democratic system of "checks and balances."
• Candidate 3: Ed Morrissey at Hot Air invents an awesome new concept. This was "less of a coup and more of a military impeachment."
• Candidate 4: At the Corner, Ray Walser praised the way "Congress, the courts, and the military joined forces" in a "deliberate, bipartisan manner."
• Candidate 5: Rick Moran at the American Thinker doesn't care if it's a coup, only who it serves: "Does the fact that the coup is in the interests of the United States even matter to our president?"