By GEORGE CHANDLER
Los Alamos

I love Paul Krugman.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/02/06/opinion/thepoint/krugman-biden-age?smid=url-share

I am two years older than Joe Biden. Like my hero Paul Krugman, I am disgusted by the tactics of the Republicans, who can’t find anything convincingly wrong with Biden’s performance (sterling in my view) so like everything else they do, they make stuff up by creating misinformation about his age.

Actually, I’ve become sensitized to discriminatory baseless BS about age. Political rhetoric now routinely calls on the old generation to make way for young blood, as if there’s something magical about being young and misinformed (addicted to Tik-Tok and X) that’s better than having actual experience and reading books.

Joe Biden has drawn on decades of foreign policy experience to steer a steady course through the mess in Gaza and the even more threatening machinations of the Republican hero running Russia these days. He’s gutsy – knowing he would get political heat he bit the bullet and got us out of Afghanistan in an operation that was skillfully executed with a minimum of glitches.  He out-maneuvered the Republicans in Congress to get billions in funding for infrastructure and research and support for renewables and a renaissance of the nuclear power industry and child care and … . With the Fed he has held the course on the economy as we recovered from the pandemic-induced inflation and threat of a recession and we’re now looking at a stock market that’s setting new records every day, low unemployment and inflation that is de facto at the 2% target.

If this is age-induced incompetence then we need more of it.