British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is the one credited with saying; “A week is a long time in politics.” The words were said when some crisis or other was sweeping across Britain during Wilson’s time in office. The thought was as true then as it is now. Stuff happens and it doesn’t take long. This is at least the third time I have sat down to the keyboard to write something about the events of our time as they unfold only to find the piece had been overtaken by more recent events.

We are at this hour in chapter three or four of the trade war with the United States and Donald Trump or Elon Musk or whoever it is running the place these days. That edge has softened today with a kind of reprieve on what Trump says would be day one of tariffs. That crisis is off for a month now which lets me get back to previous ideas about which I was going to write about when THEY were at the top of the political agenda.

My initial choice of subject was to be the Liberal leadership race in this country and the battle shaping up. It was to be a battle to see which Liberal was going to lose to Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives. I was all set to go with something about Poilievre being “the odds-on favourite” to win in an election based on the idea of axing the carbon tax. That is no longer the place where Poilievre can comfortably hang the hat of Conservative hopes on that issue. Recent events have changed the maps. The tariff crisis with the U.S. and the emergence of a new Liberal leadership race are the events. One of the candidates in the person of Mark Carney, former major-domo of the Bank of Canada, is talking about ending the carbon tax himself if he becomes Prime Minister.

Now those two events took the steam out of my original theme for this week and that was about how disappointed I was in the Democratic Party in the United States. I have been a fan of the Democratics since I was a boy. The candidacy of John Fitzgerald Kennedy made everyone who went to a Catholic school like me a Democrat. It sounds silly to say it now in the 21st century but it is true. Since then, the Democrats have been the party of liberalism and the party of fair play and decency. They are “of the left” as I am “of the left.” The Republicans, on the other hand, were the party of business and conservatism. They weren’t my style.

I trusted the Democrats right up until halfway through the presidential election that Donald Trump won over Joe Biden. I could see Joe Biden was a good guy. I could also see he had served his country well. I came to understand that near the end of his terms Joe Biden was impaired. He wasn’t himself. He had been gripped by age.

What turned me from the Democrats wasn’t Biden but rather the fact the party kept his frailty from the voters. They propped him up and pretended everything was okay. Joe didn’t seem to know the war was over as the old expression goes. He had his moments but that was it. In his debate with Donald Trump, he fell apart. Now hindsight is 20/20 and I should have known that Joe Biden was an old man. So is Donald Trump. Are either of these men “fit” to be President of the United States. They are both approaching or staggering into their eightieth year. I say that without fear of being attacking for speaking ill of the elderly. I get a free pass because I am nearly 80 myself. If I go shopping, I need an afternoon nap. I don’t think I could manage being president. Sometimes I forget where I parked the car at the supermarket.

The question I wonder about is who is running things in American politics. You can argue that Elon Musk has his hand on the strings that control Donald Trump. Who was the master-puppeteer in the last days of Joe Biden? Who propped him up and told us that everything was fine?

These are the issues that keep me up nights. I will write (30) at the bottom of this Herald offering but something else will have happened before it is uploaded. Already the idea of the Americans’ occupying Gaza has emerged and now an order from Trump has ended transgendered basketball players playing for women’s teams.

I need some sleep. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow.

You can contact Jim Furlong at [email protected]