About Last Night

I didn't watch the SOTU - for the first time in a very long time. 

I decided instead to binge "Dirty Money" on Netflix (which was even more depressing), and then I switched to picking fly shit out of my pepper shaker because that at least retains a tiny bit of entertainment value.

First blush - WaPo:

Have a president’s words ever rung more hollow? In his first State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Trump spoke of “what kind of nation we are going to be. All of us, together, as one team, one people and one American family.” Yet Mr. Trump could not avoid, even for an hour, lacing his address with divisive references to hot-button issues and graceless attacks on his predecessors: to “disastrous Obamacare,” “the mistakes of past administrations,” “the era of economic surrender” and more.

You caught that, right? Translation: "You look like me and you think like me and you act like me, or you get the fuck out."

Cult45 devotees believe America is some kind of social club, and the first order of business is to keep people out of it.

More to the point, he offered little reason to hope that his second-year policies would be more constructive than those of his first. The president spent the past year attacking America’s democratic institutions and splitting the “American family.” His concern for building “one team” has not stopped him from ramping up deportations of harmless people or imperiling the future of the “dreamers,” all of whom have played their part on the American team. His desire for bipartisanship has not led him to negotiate with Democrats in good-faith on health care, taxes or immigration. His search for unity did not stop him Tuesday from taking a gratuitous dig at football players who kneel during the national anthem. As he took a victory lap on the economy, Mr. Trump displayed his typical indifference to the truth, claiming he “enacted the biggest tax cuts and reforms in American history.” They are not.

So, typical of the Daddy State, the "speech" was a fair demonstration that it takes about 90 minutes for a below-average rooster to claim credit for the sunrise, and to intimidate the other chickens by flapping his wings a lot and strutting around desperately pretending not to know that most of us can see him for the phony tin-plated martinet that he so obviously is.

- and this doozy from Ed Rogers:

Oh, and by the way, you probably haven’t heard much of this from the liberal mainstream media, but Democrats could not appear more fractured in the aftermath of Trump’s State of the Union address. Democrats scheduled six separate responses to the president’s address...

No, Ed - there were six responses (and more than that number were justified, I think) because that's just how bad your "president" has stunk up the joint.

For all you "Yeah-but-the-Dems-don't-have-a-message" dolts in the immediate vicinity:  Oh for fuck's sake.

First, stop thinking you can talk some sense into the rubes - you're not The Idiot Meat-Bag Whisperer.

Second, "What Message?" Pick a fucking message; any fucking message. We heard exactly the same 10 or 12 policy messages  from the SOTU Responders last night that Hillary and Bernie and many others spent all of 2016 trying to get across to us.

Economic equity
Infrastructure
Training and/or schooling
Equal rights
Rule of law
Environment
and
and
and

But no - Fart Breathers like Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon saw large numbers of rubes who were making the deliberate choice to be deaf and blind, and they decided the only possible conclusion was that Hillary had gone mute.

Of course, you can only make that stick if you assume 2016 happened under "normal" circumstances - which brings us back around to the simple fact that way too many of us are trying to pretend "The Presumption Of Regularity" is still valid and in place. It isn't.

BTW: Hey, Press Poodles - we know y'all went to school and learnt your-bad-selfs a right big bunch about how this politics bidness is supposed to work; and we know you're just dyin' to show that off a little. We get it.

But here's the thing: All of that's about halfway down inside the dung heap now.  So stop looking for every goddamned opportunity to show us what you think you know about how things oughta be, and start reporting on the way things are.

We're all being buried in this shit pile together, so you can be all college-y and impressive later - for right now, we need you on a shovel.