I WAS ruffled to the point where as host of a talk-show programme, I should always be careful not to violate protocol.
But all over the world the past umpteen years, we have seen interviewers get irritated when powerful men and women with undue influence during an interview would say horrible things that so shocked the host that they lost their cool.

This happened to me two weeks ago when I did an interview with two leading personalities from the opposition party, ANUG. Kian Jabour told us that why the developed world works and people don’t break the law is because they have systems in place to make people accountable.

I printed my attitude to what Jabour said, so there is no need to reproduce the arguments here. See my Saturday column of May 24, 2025, “Five days before the 59th year of independence.” Jabour is not the only one in Guyana who thinks like that. There are actually Prime Ministers in the Caribbean whose colonial mentality runs far deeper than Jabour’s.
Several Prime Ministers of Jamaica and Trinidad, past and present, are psychologically endowed with the fiction that the Privy Council is of higher judicial quality than the Caribbean Court of Justice.
There are many people in this country, including politicians who want to run this large, petro state that believe Western medicine, Western politics, Western things are superior to those of China, Brazil, Russia, South Korea, Thailand, South Africa, etc…

I thought of Jabour when I read what former American president, Bill Clinton said in an interview with CBS over the weekend. When you listen to Clinton, you see in the most graphic way in front of your very eyes the nature of politics in the West, the very West, we in the post-colonial world think is of higher quality than ours.
Clinton was emphatic that Joe Biden has no cognitive problems. He asserted the normality of the mental faculties of Mr. Biden and said he will not read a recent book, “Original Sin” by two leading American journalists that documents with compelling facts the mental decline of Mr. Biden.

Mr. Clinton is dishonest and barefaced. And it is people like Mr. Clinton when the Democrats were in power the past five years that were responsible for the victory of Donald Trump. The entire globe knows Mr. Biden has cognitive problems. It caused him to concede to the demands of the big ones in the Democratic Party to oust him as presidential candidate.

Mr. Clinton made his remarks over the weekend and it was just two weeks ago, Mr. Biden was the guest on The View when he showed once more signs of mental decline and his wife had to come to his rescue.
The consensus among Americans is that Mrs. Biden went to the studio to protect Mr. Biden should he falter, and faltered he did and she came to his rescue. Apparently, Mr. Clinton did not see that edition of The View.
You look at Mr. Clinton’s attitude, you know this is politics all over the world, but the West has rammed down our throat the fiction that our political culture is of inferior quality, and that our rulers lack character, finesse,

and substance. The thing about what Mr. Clinton said is that his remarks were viewed all over the world. The peoples of the world know that Mr. Clinton is not being truthful.
But do you think Mr. Clinton cares what the world says about him? In the Third World, we rush to criticise our leaders for the clothes they wear and the things they say. We want them to adhere to Western standards. But even in the West, political standards are low and you have a pyrotechnical example of Clinton on the mental state of Mr. Biden.

He denied the cognitive decline of Mr. Biden and the journalist did not correct him which brings us back to the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) and Western journalism. Look at American and European jurisprudence and compare them to the CCJ’s. India has one of the world’s top-class judiciaries and so does the Caribbean. Look at what is taking place in the Federal Supreme Court in the US right at this minute.

The judges on the Supreme Court are selected for their ideological convictions and armed with those beliefs, their decisions are infused with political judgements. Finally – journalism in the West. We in the Third World can’t be serious about the credibility and independence of Western journalism after the genocide in Gaza. The world is changing. I hope the colonial mentality becomes a victim of those changes.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.