I didn’t watch the State of the Union address to Congress. At this point, I don’t think there’s enough money that could get me to watch that bloated orange baboon anus spewing his crap anymore. In the interest of sanity, I avoided it. However, I’m also a news junkie, so I did look at the highlights of the event. Here’s my takeaway:
Trump snubbing Pelosi’s handshake wasn’t surprising. If nothing else, and about the only thing, is that Trump is a showman. He understand optics, especially television optics, and he knows that his core audience isn’t for playing nice. It’s bad form for those of us with a more reasonable mentality that want to heal the divide, but Trump is about Trump. He’ll do what plays to his advantage and screw any unity. Pelosi tearing up his speech at the end was optics as well. While it’s viewed by some as rude, I think waiting until he was actually done was showing incredible politeness given the circumstances. Frankly, I wouldn’t have minded if the Democrats had been throwing rotten vegetables at Trump during the speech. It’s all the dignity he deserves.
Most of the address was about theatrics. The soldier’s reunion with his family, the scholarship moment, all done for the sake of television. I’ll let others go into more depth on the facts, or lack thereof, in Trump’s statements. I don’t really have the time to go over all of that here. Suffice to say that, yes, the market is doing well, but the market is not the economy. And yes, unemployment is low, but also keep in mind how unemployment is calculated, namely that the underemployed and or those who have given up looking for work are not counted. So there’s a big disconnect in the numbers and practical reality.
The big disgusting moment came with the awarding of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh. Let’s first address the elephant in the room. Limbaugh announced that he was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer on Monday. Now, I try not to engage in genuine Schadenfreude. There’s finding humor in someone getting hit on the head for comedic purposes, as in the Three Stooges. Then there’s watching someone die slowly and painfully from a hideous illness, even if they’re your worst enemy. There’s a big difference. I’ve been lucky enough to not personally have known anyone who’s had to suffer through that, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have empathy. So while I don’t take joy or even wish this on Limbaugh, admittedly his track record does make it difficult to truly wish him well.
So when Trump announced that he was giving Limbaugh the Medal of Freedom, it didn’t go over too well. This is a man who has made a career out of dividing America. A man who’s been trying to Jerry-Springer things on the streets, not just for a studio audience for entertainment purposes. This is a man who said that he would abandon the US to what he considered its fate if the Affordable Care Act was ever passed into law and run away to Costa Rica (still waiting on that one, by the way). And now the orange shitstain is blatantly politicizing the Medal of Freedom by giving it to a conservative mouthpiece? I wouldn’t be surprised to hear some previous winners throwing their medals away in disgust. The award is now permanently stained and will never be the same.
With the politics of divisiveness on full display and being used just to win elections, the question becomes “What Union?” We are not united in anything. There is no unity, and thus, if there is a “Union” it’s holding together by a thread. Anyway, these are just some quick thoughts and I don’t want to go into anymore detail on the speech, but I had to get this out there.
SheldonNylander.com 