A video by a Republican who has long seen through Donald Trump.

NOT OK

President Biden has his stuttering, which has become worse in his old age. He has his senior moment memory lapses. Ordinarily he has his aides, teleprompters, computers and notes to lean on. The man is of sound mind even if he’s kind of frail. His judgment is still healthy and barring a sudden change in his physical condition should get him and his administration through the remaining few months of his term.

Donald Trump spent years taunting Biden about his frailty. That’s Trump’s overgrown school bully nature. He also taunts people with cerebral palsy.

The US ´presidency, however, is not like being the quarterback of an American football team. It’s an administrative job. At that, both in his selection and his management of people, Biden has done well. Compare it to the Trump administration and it’s akin to day and night. The chaotic turnover of the Trump years, and all the former members his team who despise him and in this campaign season are telling the press and public why, are unmatched by the Biden administration.

So many of the Democrats who urged Biden to go were panicky, unkind and overly concerned with their own positions, but there was a problem and in his sound judgment the president chose an apt moment to step aside, to pass the torch of party and likely national leadership to a new generation.

If the GOP nominee can’t go on, he has chosen a guy who changed his name twice, an advocate of ugly inequalities in society, a man who makes a big show of his gun, someone who rose to fame by writing a book in which he slut-shamed his mother.

Meanwhile Kamala Harris has stepped to the fore, asserted some policy differences that will serve to unite her party, is in the process of choosing her own new team, and all the while remains loyal to the country and to her superior in the administrative chain of command, the president. In more ways than one, the former prosecutor is moving to keep the peace. The Republicans are responding with ugly and defamatory remarks about her race and gender.

The USA and the Democratic Party have moved on, and the 78-year-old crank, with his party, is moving in the opposite direction. Americans, including US citizens living in Panama, have some stark choices to make.

Venes

Hard-pressed Venezuela votes on Sunday. Two-term incumbent Nicolás Maduro is running for a third term. He may have thought that he put it all in the bag about a year ago when his goons ruled opposition leader María Corina Machado off of the ballot, as she was crushing him in the polls at that time. Machado’s stand-in, however, Edmundo González Urrutia, was ahead in some fairly credible polls in the run-up to this vote.

Maduro, Hugo Chávez’s last and worst mistake, has been a horrible president. Would the United States and its allies have allowed him to be anything else? Panama jumped on that bandwagon when it didn’t have to, and for that foreign policy success we have been flooded with Venezuelans mostly fleeing from their country’s trashed economy but sometimes also running away from overt political persecution.

The oligarchs whom the Bolivarian Revolution ran out of power? So many of them have settled into comfortable lives in places like Miami, Bucaramanga and Costa del Este. Edmundo González isn’t one of those. A schoolteacher’s kid, he served both the Bolivarian governments and their predecessors as a diplomat.

There will be election observers, perhaps some of them neutral. Part of the old playbook is that, whatever happens, old enemies will declare any victory by the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) to be fraudulent. Former Panamanian president Mireya Moscoso would be on one such set of “observers” but it appears that the government there isn’t prepared to let her in.

Moscoso does not speak for Panama and should not be allowed to present herself as doing so. The Mulino administration should speak cautiously, independently, wisely and above all truthfully about what transpires.

If Maduro loses and accepts that fate, it would go a long way toward solving Panama’s migration problem. For our part, we should recognize that it isn’t always a problem. There are migrants who are illegally here whom we ought to welcome to stay. Venezuela is a sister Latin American republic that has gone through nightmare times and some who have been pushed out have much to offer Panama. Many are professionals whom Panama could fit into national development policies for their benefit and this country’s. Mulino has stated his policies, but let’s be calmly deliberate about carrying them out. Let’s be so rational and courteous about it so that among those who go back, we will find a lot of knowing friends in Venezuela.

Regardless of how it turns out, let’s also learn out lessons. Panama is a sovereign independent republic that should not be manipulated into attacking our neighbors, especially when that runs counter to our real long-term interests. If we rightly look askance at some of the stuff that Maduro has pulled to stay in power, that doesn’t mean that the Venezuelans should be Panama’s enemies.

Nora Ephron, by Prachatai.

Bear in mind…

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