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Just a bunch of commies, non-governmental organizations and special interest groups, defending a guy who admits he's a leftist --- the dismissal will go something like that. As Paco Gómez Nadal and Pilar Chato were on their way from Panama to Spain after the Martinelli regime deported them, Hillary Clinton went to Capitol Hill and talked about Panama as if this never happened, or didn't matter. And surely to the senators and representatives whose minds are still part of the "Washington Consensus" about how Latin America ought to be run, this doesn't register --- only what those corporations that bankroll their or their opponents' campaigns want matters very much.

But the US Congress doesn't vote on a free trade pact with Panama unless Barack Obama sends it to them. The president, for his part, doesn't send such a thing to Congress without provoking a fight within his own party as he is trying to put things together to seek re-election next year.

The mainstream corporate media have downsized and dumbed down, such that few people in the United States ever hear about Panama. Editors and news directors there know that it's far more important for Americans to know about which drugs Charlie Sheen is taking and which guy Paris Hilton is seeing than anything about Latin America. Maybe a particularly gruesome mass murder in Mexico might get mentioned on the nightly news, but Panama is out of the picture.

However, the journalist defense groups, the foreign policy think tanks, the US Indian nations, the labor unions, the human rights groups and others who could give the president a hard time within the Democratic Party will have heard about Ricardo Martinelli and the expulsion of Paco Gómez Nadal and Pilar Chato, and this is now added to the litany. It increases the political damage that Obama would suffer if he is perceived to be pandering to Martinelli. It probably also enhances Obama's personal annoyance with Martinelli.

The Panamanian president can complain, or get his Republican friends or even some Blue Dog Democrats to complain for him on Capitol Hill. But these friends of Martinelli can't affect Obama's standing with the rank-and-file of his own party the way that the activists can.

Gómez and Chato, however, are not Americans. They're Spaniards and they are not happy with Madrid's quiet acceptance of their expulsion from Panama. But in Europe, to a greater extent than in the United States, Ricardo Martinelli's abusive and erratic behavior gets noticed. The man's personality reflects on the country's credibility, and those things mean a great deal to European-dominated organizations like the OECD, which can make financial transactions involving Panama harder or easier, depending on what they perceive.

The bottom line? It's only a blip in the broad sweep of history, but political careers are shorter than that. Here Martinelli must synchronize himself with a time scale in which everything ends in the middle of 2014 and a brief window of opportunity for dealing with Obama closes for a year or so beginning sometime around November. Set in those time constraints, a rash act against two journalists was an expenditure of Martinelli's scarce political capital, for which he and Panama have apparently received nothing in return.