nails it:

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Tomorrow night, the president of the United States will address a divided government and a weary nation. In so doing, he’ll attempt to make the case that the state of the union is sound, that his administration’s policies have made it so, and that the continuation and extension of those policies is essential for the good of the country. The nominal opposition party, in the person of one of its more “moderate” orators, will respond with respectful disagreement.

Neither the president’s speech nor the nominal opposition’s response will truthfully address the true condition of the republic.

Neither the president nor the nominal opposition will offer bold solutions to the nation’s vexing problems.

Neither the president nor the nominal opposition will own up to their respective responsibility for creating or perpetuating those problems….

This is why I don’t do live-blogging of these kind of things. My patience for BS is so short that after awhile I’d just post *insert blatant lie here* and be done with it.

Honestly, what’s the point of the State of the Union address? It doesn’t serve to inform anyone, it’s been yet another political soapbox since forever ago, there’s zero honesty about anything & no one watches it anyway. Of the few people who actually think it’s worth watching, none of them are going to come away with any different thoughts afterwards than they had beforehand. I would call it intellectual masturbation, except that’d be an insult to both words.

Having recently got my cable back on, I admit, I’ve looked at a little bit of the punditry about it. It’s amusing to me, I laugh more during some of that crap than during 80% of the standup they show on Comedy Central. These people get paid to act like it’s this earth-shattering event, like depending on what Bush’s speechwriters have scrawled on those sheets of paper in front of him things’ll start workin out, approaching it from every angle except one that even remotely makes sense.

See, any discussion that gets aired in the mainstream can only disagree on a narrow set of variables, no one is taken seriously who questions the entire structure. It’s like playing blackjack at gunpoint: you can hit, or you can stay, getting up isn’t your call.

For more on why the SOTU is meaningless, see Tim West.

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