There is this constant question about American foreign policy. Why is it that some countries are our allies when they are so horrible? Of course, the claim is always that we support “democracy” and “the rule of law” and “respect for human rights.” But that doesn’t seem to ever be the case. For example, I think that the United Kingdom is a democracy that supports the rule of law and respects human rights. But I don’t think that’s the reason that the UK is our ally. I think we decide whether to have an ally and only afterward do we apply those nice sounding labels on them.

More often, these labels are not used in the affirmative. We don’t generally say that we have an ally because of these things. Instead, we claim that a country is our enemy because they are not a democracy or whatever. And that fact came very much to the fore recently when King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia died. He was a horrible man — a despot. This is a man who was fine with beheading another for the “crime” of witchcraft. A real class act from a real classy country. But who needs class and, you know, the Enlightenment, when you have huge oil reserves and the biggest military in the world willing to do anything for you?

Last Friday, Glenn Greenwald put together a great compare and contrast, Obama’s Reaction to the Deaths of King Abdullah and Hugo Chávez. As readers of this site know, I’m fairly fond of Chávez. It wasn’t that he was an especially great leader. But he distinguished himself in that he wasn’t totally corrupt and he actually tried to make the resources of his nation work for the good of the people. (Imagine iff a US president did that!) And that puts him well ahead of most leaders. That, of course, also put him at odds with the US government. If Chávez had been willing to make deals with US interests that made him and his friends rich at the expense of his people, the US government (and its lapdog media) would have been fine with him — regardless of what else he did.

How do I know? Well, just look at Abdullah. For a good rundown of what a great guy he was, check out Murtaza Hussain’s obituary, Saudi Arabia’s Tyrant King Misremembered as Man of Peace. He was a vile man who not only supported just about every horrible thing the US does, but also did a lot of his own war-making. Check out this example of his commitment to peace and democracy:

But really, you don’t need to look any further than the 9/11 hijackers. Of the 19 men, 15 were from Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden himself was from Saudi Arabia. Any normal country would have to answer for that. If those 15 had instead been from Venezuela, we would have invaded the country. As it was, we helped stage a coup in 2002. It appears that to the US government, “democracy” is just another word for “countries that do as they’re told.” What’s even more frustrating is that the US media were universal in their condemnation of Chávez when he mocked Bush at the United Nations. No mention was ever made of the coup, of course, because that would have been unfair to Bush.

When Chávez died, this was the official response, which is as close to “good riddance” as these things ever get:

Translation: unless you idiots in Venezuela elect a pro-corporate government, you won’t have a government committed to policies that promote democratic principles, the rule of law, and respect for human rights. It’s really that simple. Meanwhile, Obama had “deep respect” for Abdullah. Most of the statement is about all the great work that he did for peace and the education of his people. No mention is made of the Saudi Arabian government being committed to policies that promote democratic principles, the rule of law, and respect for human rights. That’s because it isn’t.

But it doesn’t matter. All this disingenuous nonsense means is that any country that plays nice with the US, allowing our corporations and military access, is fine. And if it doesn’t, then it is terrible. And expect the US to do everything it can to destroy that country. Because it isn’t okay to have oil reserves used to help the poor. There are needy corporations here in America!

I should have my head examined. Mental illness is the only explanation that I can think of for why I ever watch 60 Minutes — but most especially last night when the first segment was a Scott Pelley interview with John Boehner and Mitch McConnell. Now I’ll admit, these two did a fine job of embarrassing themselves. But mostly, it just provided an opportunity for these two bozos to state their talking points without fear of harassment. And there were all kinds of things they had to say that are, at best, total distortions — the kind of things you normally have to be a committed Fox News viewer to see. And 60 Minutes, as usual, was there to comfort the comfortable.

The interview started with the two Republican leaders expressing their dismay that Obama didn’t come to the State of the Union address with cap in hand. McConnell noted that Obama seemed like he was campaigning for a third term. Later in the segment, Boehner bemoaned the fact that Obama offered no olive branch, “I can tell you, we’re interested in working with him!” I’m curious just what these guys think that Obama would have gotten by showing up as a naughty boy who’d been caught. Because we know what happened in 2011, after the Democrats lost the House, when Obama did reach out to the Republicans. We came incredibly close to breaching the Debt Ceiling and only avoided it with, by far, the worst policy of the Obama years: savage cuts to government spending.

Boehner did most of the talking. He seemed like he really needed a cigarette. And he pushed the Republicans’ newest lie: the Democrats are responsible for income inequality. This came after Pelley asked if Obama shouldn’t get credit for the improving economy. As far as I can tell, he shouldn’t get credit for the improving economy, but he should get credit for increasing inequality. He’s like the opposite of God: when something good happens, he gets no credit; when something bad happens, he gets all the blame.

So why is it that the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer? Well, they weren’t willing to talk about how it was all due to the rich being over-taxed. But they did use the second standard Republican Economic Solution for Everything ™: regulation. But the only regulation that Boehner could think of was Obamacare. It, apparently, is the reason that the economy is getting more unequal. Or something.

There is a further discussion of Obamacare, which is part of the internet extras at the link above. Pelley actually pushed back against the Republican leaders — especially on the fact that they have no ideas for what they are going to replace it with. But eventually, Boehner was allowed to go on about what the Republicans want to do. Regular readers of this site should be able to list everything that Boehner said because it is the same list they always have, none of which lower healthcare costs: buy insurance across state lines (all insurers would run to the least regulated state and provide useless coverage) and tort reform (wouldn’t lower costs because doctors don’t actually over-treat because of insurance concerns). He didn’t mention high deductible plans, but maybe they just cut that. He did mention allowing small employers to group together. But Obamacare not only does that for small employers, but for everyone. And the Republicans hate it. At the beginning he mentioned “allowing states to create their own exchanges.” I assume this is just a new talking point to push King v Burwell.

The whole thing was totally disingenuous. At one point, Pelley did a lot of heavy lifting by allowing the two to dump all over Harry Reid for not allowing some of the crazy bills coming out of the House to have a vote in the Senate. This was somehow wrong, but the idea of sending a whole bunch of crazy bills to the president for his veto was just how the system works. Like I said, these two bozos dig their own graves just by talking. But most people don’t know much about this stuff. And instead of countering them as Mike Wallace would have done decades ago, 60 Minutes is just fine to let lies transmit to televisions all over the nation. Because who’s to say what is true? Certainly not Scott Pelley! He lives in a world full of fairies and elves, where you can have all the candy you want: the postmodern world where reality is whatever you say it is. Sadly, I don’t live in that world. If I did, 60 Minutes would have been canceled long ago, and the Republican leaders would have committed seppuku for the great shame they have brought to their families and their nation.

The fact that Joni Ernst is a disingenuous fraud is not news. Many people have reported on her folksy lines in the response to the State of the Union speech. I think Michael Hiltzik dealt with it the best, Senator Joni Ernst Learned to “Live Within Her Means” — on the Taxpayer’s Dime. It’s not just that one speech, however. Her whole political career has been based on the cliche of growing up on a hard working family farm when times were tough. This is nonsense, of course. Ernst was born in 1970 — not 1920. This is a period when farm subsidies were good (as they continue to be). So it is no surprise that from 1995 to 2009 (the only period during which we have data), her extended family received almost a half million dollars of that sweet, sweet government welfare.

In this way, Ernst is entirely typical of her party. It is amazing to me that Republicans manage to get any traction at all by claiming that Democrats are divisive and wage “class war.” The Republican Party is committed to taking money away from the truly needy in the name of teaching them to “live within their means.” But they want to hold firm or even increase handouts for the affluent. And no, this is not just the reverse of the Democrats. The Democratic Party does have its targets, but they are mostly inefficiencies in expensive programs. As I’ve noted many times before, the programs that Republicans want to cut are almost exclusively ones that don’t cost that much money, because we are already fairly stingy when it comes to the poor and it doesn’t cost much to help them to begin with.

This highlights perhaps the most pernicious lie in American politics: conservatives want smaller government and liberals want bigger government. Leave aside the fact that Democrats really don’t care about the size of government — they simply want effective government. Do conservatives really want smaller government? Maybe in theory. They like the idea of getting government off the metaphorical back of Americans. But what they really mean is that they don’t want the government to get in the way of the rich doing anything that they want. If we passed a law saying that anyone who made more a $100,000 a year was immune to all government regulations (including taxes), the Republicans would have no platform except for a smattering of issues designed only to make the lives of the poor worse.

From a practical standpoint, Republicans have been the biggest spendthrifts of them all. That isn’t surprising, for as I noted, the things that the Republicans want to spend more money on are really expensive. This is why the deficit only gets bigger under Republicans (Reagan, Bush I, Bush II) and only ever gets smaller under Democrats (Carter, Clinton, Obama). I may be against deficit and debt obsession, but most Americans are not. And Republicans claim to care about debt and deficits, but all they really care about is cutting aid to the poor and middle classes. And as for taxes, check out, Reagan’s Legacy: Tax Cuts for Rich, Tax Hikes for the Rest.

What’s amazing is that people like Joni Ernst are allowed to go around talking about how we have to cut food stamps because the poor need a lesson about how to live within their means. She, and the whole Republican Party, should be widely mocked in the press. But apparently, our media think that “objectivity” requires respectful reporting on whatever delusions the Republicans are currently trafficking. I know if things were reversed and the Democrats were peddling nonsense in the name of helping the poor, the media would not report it respectfully.

Steven D over at Booman Tribune alerted me, Unarmed Black Man Shot By Cops, Again. It is about Jarame C Reid who was killed during a traffic stop in Bridgeton, NJ — in which he was just the passenger. It happened back on 30 December, but it is getting attention how because the police dashboard camera video was just released. And it shows that Reid was shot while he was apparently unarmed with his hands raised over his head.

I’ll be honest: I haven’t watched the video. I’m not going to watch the video. Things like that are extremely upsetting regardless of the circumstances. But according to all the reporting, the video is clear. Steven D added, “You can hear anxiety, anger and fear in the voices of the police…” And I figure that’s what happened here. Police, like all people, get themselves worked up. Emotionally, they are on a hair trigger and unfortunately, they have guns. This is not to apologize for the officers, but I can well see how such a thing could happen without the officers being psychopaths.

What bothers me in all this is that the shooting was not really a story for three weeks. There were witnesses who said that Reid was shot while unarmed and with his hands up. But that didn’t much matter — especially after Michael Brown, and what was a farce of a grand jury and the resulting media narrative that claimed that such eyewitnesses were lying, when they were contradicted only by the officer and one clearly deranged racist who almost certainly wasn’t there. So I can understand why the media is reluctant to report on yet another case where the police kill an unarmed black man who had his hands raised.

Is this where we are as a society? Can the police kill any black man with a crowd of ten thousand witnesses, and have it be no story? That is: it is no story unless there is video footage of the incident? That certainly seems to be the case. Certainly, Eric Garner’s death would have been nothing at all if it hadn’t been for the video. And even with the video, there was no indictment. And I seriously doubt there will be an indictment in Reid’s case. Because it can’t be the officers’ fault because it is never the officers’ fault because they were afraid and their jobs are so dangerous. Also: a police officer’s word is always golden because they would never lie — not even when it is very much in their interests to do so.

We have a really bad situation in this country. And it is bizarre. The same people who are convinced that they must hold onto their guns or Obama will send the black helicopters after them, believe that local law enforcement officers are above the law. But even apart from these freaks, white America needs to wake up. This may be primarily a problem in minority communities where it seems that the police are constantly in fear of their lives. But that kind of thing grows. Nothing I’ve seen indicates that the police will stop being pussies. With every police shooting, all we hear is about what heroes most officers are and how dangerous their jobs are and how we should just be happy they don’t go door to door killing the first born son of every family.

So I understand how it happens that police officers allow situations to escalate, become fearful, and then use deadly force. But I don’t think that makes it acceptable. It’s like how abusing children can make them violent adults. I understand, but that doesn’t excuse it. I still think murderers should be punished. As a society, we can’t continue to excuse misbehavior and incompetence on the part of our police. The stakes are too high.

The consistently brilliant Jonathan Bernstein was answering questions yesterday. And one of them really caught my eye, So What If Majority Parties Lose? In the article, he claimed, for example, that the Republicans holding the House in 2012 despite losing the popular vote was more due to a Democrat being in the White House than any built in advantage for the Republicans. He also claimed that it is most democratic to not allow small majorities to do whatever they want (as can happen in a parliamentary system). I have problems with both claims, even if I don’t fully disagree.

Let’s start with the idea that there is no built in advantage for Republicans — a claim that Bernstein seemed to imply, but in fairness, never said. In the article, Bernstein noted that the Democrats did very well in 2006. That’s true, but so what? In the House that year, Democrats won 15% more seats than the Republicans did. But they also won 20% more of the popular vote. Compare that to 2012 when the Democrats got 14% less of the seats, even though they won 2% more of the vote. Or 2010: Republicans got 25% more seats but won the popular vote by 15%. Or 2014: Republicans got 31% more seats but won the popular vote by less than 13%. That seems like an extremely troubling systemic bias. And this is the House of Representatives! The Senate is far less democratic — by design. But it is clear that we have problems that go beyond the design of our system and the fact that liberal voters live in high density areas.

This brings up something that really bugs me. It is the idea that there is a “natural gerrymandering” because liberals live in high density places like cities and states that aren’t backwaters. I don’t have a huge problem with the Senate. It is, as I mentioned, designed that way. Similarly, there is a smaller effect in low population states in the House. But there is nothing natural about putting making districts strictly urban or rural. The only thing that is natural is that it is to the advantage of various political actors to do that. These same political actors have no problem creating the most unnatural districts when that suits them.

Bernstein’s main point in the article is one that I’m not totally against. It goes back to Karl Rove’s idea that if you got 50% plus one vote, that gave you the ability to do anything you want. Of course, it doesn’t. It is more true when Republicans are in the majority because, in general, Democrats are spineless pussies. But in some ways, it is good that our system is set up to make change proceed slowly.

But there is another aspect of this that I think is quite poisonous. Because political parties never get to do what they really want to do, the voters never get to see clearly what they are voting for. For example, as much as the Republicans may whine, Obamacare is still a fairly conservative plan. So the people never got the opportunity to see a truly liberal idea: Medicare for all. Similarly, the economic policy these last six years has been more conservative than the policies we saw of any Republican going back to Hoover. I don’t mean tax policy here. I mean government spending. So we’ve had a very slow recovery. But that isn’t the fault of liberal policy.

The question is whether allowing voters to see what their actual votes mean would make up for the absolutely disastrous policy that the Republicans would push when they did get into power. And I have to admit: I don’t know. But it does bug me that the American voter still depends almost entirely on the vagaries of the economy to determine who to vote for. It all seems quite random. And in this way, Bernstein was right when he noted, “In other words, it’s a problem if a party that takes 49.5 percent of the vote gets to run the government, but it’s almost as big a problem if a party that wins 50.5 percent gets to run it.” But maybe if people were able to see what their votes mean, we wouldn’t have a political party as crazy as the modern Republicans.

Tuesday night, in all there were four responses to the president’s State of the Union address (plus a repeat of the regular one in Spanish). It’s pretty amazing when you consider that the address itself was pretty much always just a letter until Woodrow Wilson. But it speaks to just how screwed up the Republican Party is that they can’t manage to have just a single speech they can unify around. It is an outgrowth of the revolutionary nature of the conservative movement. It also speaks to the narcissism of some of their stars: most notably Rand Paul and Ted Cruz.

You may have heard that Cruz accidentally released an unedited version of his talk where he is shown stopping and starting over. It is actually kind of impressive — especially if you compare it to the over-rehearsed creep show that was the official response by Jodi Ernst. Cruz manages to make his points very well without ums and uhs, on the fly. I would be surprised if 5% of the federal level politicians were capable of this feat. When it comes to this kind of stuff, there is no doubt that Cruz is a major talent.

But Cruz is also a freak. The speech that he did release is filled with the usual conservative nonsense. And it sums up exactly what conservative pundits have been complaining about since then. His big complaint is that Obama didn’t show up repentant. Republicans are really good about claiming that the last election means the American people totally support them when they won that election, and ignoring it if they haven’t. Well, as I wrote over and over after they lost in 2012: there was no reason for any given Republican politician to “moderate.” They were still in office. They didn’t lose. And the idea of a “mandate” is generally silly regardless.

In 2010, after the Republicans had a really successful election, Obama was a fool to act as though the election meant anything at all for him. The only thing that had changed was the composition of the electorate. Almost no one had changed their minds. And regardless, Obama was elected for four years — not two. If the Republicans acted as arrogant in 2009 after the landslide of the 2008 election, how dare Cruz suggest that the president should come before Congress with his hat in his hand? But I understand: it’s all politics. Cruz knows this, of course; but he also knows that he’s talking to people who hate Obama and would hate him no matter what they did.

A good example of this was Cruz’s complaint about Obama on terrorism. This is what he said:

More generally, the conservative press has been all abuzz with the idea that Obama did not specifically mention al-Qaeda. There are always specific words that conservatives complain about the president not mentioning. It isn’t that he doesn’t talk about concepts. He mentioned “terrorist” once, “terrorism” once, and “terrorists” six times. But that isn’t good enough. He had to mention “al-Qaeda” — or according to Ted Cruz, “radical Islamic terrorism.” I wonder if “radical Islamic terrorist” would have been acceptable. This also goes along with the freak-out during the 2012 election that Obama had said “acts of terror” rather than “terrorism” after the Benghazi attack.

But this isn’t just affectation. This really gets to the heart of the revolutionary nature of the Republican Party. For outsiders, there is nothing that really separates the thinking of Jodi Ernst, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Curt Clawson, who gave the “official” Tea Party response. But inside the conservative movement, there are big disagreements. This is real Russian Revolution nonsense where the exact words that one uses indicates purity to the true (in this case) conservative movement. It is a joke. Unfortunately, it isn’t a funny one like Monty Python brought us.

Will brought my attention to this tragic story, Nine-Month-Old Boy Accidentally Shot by Brother in Elmo, Missouri. That got me doing a little research and I started thinking about the way that we make a big deal out of rare events but don’t pay any attention to common things that are much more likely to kills us.

You may remember a few days ago, I wrote, We Fear Ebola — It Is From a Scary Country. My point in that article was that our fear of Ebola was all about our fear of the manner of death rather than death itself. Ebola, which has been responsible for exactly one death in America, was a big deal, but influenza, which has killed dozens of children just this season, is not. In that case, I think it has a lot to do with notions of purity: influenza is our disease and Ebola is theirs.

Similarly, the nation freaked out when 12 people were murdered in the Charlie Hebdo massacre. But even at the time, I had silently compared it to something I care a lot about: a bit more than twice that many pedestrians are killed in traffic accidents each day. I’m not equating these things except in the sense that they both represent unnatural ways to die. It is true that there will always be accidents (although there are many things we could do to make pedestrians safer). But what about accidental gun deaths?

According to research compiled by Smart Gun Laws, from 2005 through 2010, there were 3,800 people in the United States who died as a result of accidental shootings. That’s 633 per year, or a bit less than two per day. So statistically, more people were accidentally killed with guns during the week of the Paris massacre than were killed by the massacre itself. What’s more, we know, “People of all age groups are significantly more likely to die from unintentional firearm injuries when they live in states with more guns, relative to states with fewer guns.” And certainly, while having one gun in the house might make you safer, having 30 certainly doesn’t — and that’s even true if you believe the black helicopters are coming for you. (I would assume you would want a few guns and lots of ammo.)

The reason I think that American gun owners don’t worry about this is partly due to purity. But the bigger issue is the sense of control. Even if guns might make people less safe, they feel safer with guns because they feel as though they control the situation. This is similar to how people can be afraid of flying in an airplane but not driving in a far less safe car. But I do think it is a delusion. Whenever I talk to gun enthusiasts about gun accidents, they tell me about gun safety classes and all the rules that they follow to keep safe. The problem is that I’m sure all the people involved in those accidents said the same thing before those accidents.

What’s more, I have never been around a gun enthusiast for any length of time without seeing occasional lapses of gun safety rules. They don’t even seem to be aware of it unless I point it out. And when I do point it out, it is usually shrugged off as an unimportant thing. And they are right. None of the rules are important until they are.

I’m not suggesting that people ought to freak out about gun safety or pedestrian safety or anything. I think we all freak out a good deal too much. But it doesn’t help to have delusions of control. I have lots of tips to help pedestrians avoid injury or death — but walking near traffic is still dangerous. There are many things that gun owners can do to minimize risks — but owning a gun is still dangerous, and I think the vast majority of people would be safest without guns. The biggest problem is the delusion that we need to worry about Muslim zealots attacking us at work. And an even bigger delusion among many of us is that we could do anything about it anyway.

It has long been my belief that the media and the Republican Party learned the same lesson from Sarah Palin’s disastrous interview with Katie Couric. And that lesson was that the Republican Party looks really bad when the media get a good, unrehearsed view of their wingnuts (which now make up over half of the party’s successful politicians). It is because the media would prefer not to go through anything as cringingly embarrassing as that interview that Joni Ernst managed to become a United States Senator while not only crazy but utterly unqualified.

This goes way back to at least the 2008 vice-presidential debate. When Biden countered her on the fact that she didn’t answer the first question, Palin replied, “I may not answer the questions the way that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I’m going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also.” And that was how the debate went: she just talked about whatever she wanted in her own peculiar way also. I don’t suppose that there was anything that could have been done about that. But afterward, the media reaction was mostly relief that it didn’t result in anything like this:

So when Jodi Ernst was running for the Senate, the media did not push the way they would have pushed a regular candidate — a Democrat, or a Republican who wasn’t crazy, ignorant, and of average intelligence. But now she’s in the Senate and there is no reason to think that the media will push her any harder than they have pushed her before. (Note: other than comedians, the media went very easy on Sarah Palin after the Couric debacle.) And the Republicans know that. So they have decided to use Ernst as a trained seal — or something like that.

She is, after all, attractive. She is a woman. She’s not a terrible speaker. So why not have her give the response to the State of the Union speech? But they decided to do it right. Just as Sarah Palin wasn’t going to answer questions in her debate, Joni Ernst wasn’t going to give a response to the president:

And thus began the nine minute infomercial, “The Republican Party Is Not Scary.” The whole thing was so over-rehearsed that I’m quite sure Ernst did little more than practice for the last week. But the style reminded me of those dreadful animatronic creatures like they had at Disneyland when I was a kid. But perhaps more accurate would be to say that she seemed like one of The Stepford Wives from the 1970s. I was afraid that she might crack during the speech and we would see the electronics inside.

That would be an improvement, however. As it is, I still kind of think that her conservative colleagues are just reptiles inside a human costume. So maybe they are the reptiles and she is just a robot that must be pre-programmed. Clearly, they’ve worked some of the bugs out since the Sarah Palin model. This model sticks to simple sentences and doesn’t launch into open-ended logorrhea. But it is no more convincing.

“I’m Joni Ernst. As a mother, a soldier, and a newly elected senator from the great State of Iowa, I am proud to speak with you tonight. I was just going to give you coffee. As a mother, a soldier, and a newly elected senator from the great State of Iowa, I am proud to speak with you tonight. I’m Joni Ernst. I was just going to give you coffee. As a mother, a soldier, and a newly elected senator from the great State of Iowa, I am proud to speak with you tonight.”

I spent most of the night glued to Fox News. Part of this is just that MSNBC is too predictable. But mostly, I just wanted to know what the conservatives would have to say, given that I knew Obama was going to propose some things that normally would be hugely popular — even among conservatives. And I knew they would hate these proposals. So I thought it might be fun to watch them make their bold stands for the power elite. I wanted to see them explain how they truly cared about the middle class and that is why they were for more tax cuts and subsidies for the rich. Oh: and Juan Williams was there too.

The evening did not start off well. To begin with, there was no SOTU coverage until 9:00. Bill O’Reilly did his usual 8:00 show because, you know, it was only a Democratic president giving the speech — nothing important. Finally, Bret Baier came on and gave his usual biased, but somehow still vanilla introduction. And then came Nina Easton. She’s an editor at Fortune Magazine who is mostly interested in economics, but not last night! She was going on about how Obama was going to ask for approval to attack in Iraq. Fine. But she made it out like it was a big deal and that this was what the headlines would be about tomorrow. In fact, all the discussion before the speech was about ISIS and how important terrorism is and how we should be afraid — very afraid.

This was quite interesting because after the speech, Baier came back on and said that “as predicted” the president spoke little about foreign affairs and instead focusing on domestic issues. I think that was his way of saying, “Since I’m the only halfway reasonable person in this room, I want to make it clear that I always knew that what these other fools were talking about was nonsense.” Of course, in the lead-up to the speech, he didn’t counter any of that nonsense.

At this point, we got to hear from George Will who did nothing but quote a large section of the speech with a mocking tone. He really needs to retire. He is no kind of substitute for Charles Krauthammer — and you know how highly I regard him! After Will, we got Stephen Hayes who scoffed at the president’s attempt to make nice with the Republicans because he had been the most “divisive” president in history. Blah, blah, blah. Somehow, conservatives always forget that Lincoln fought the Civil War. Regardless, Hayes’ examples all came from late in his term — after the Republicans had shunned Obama at every turn. Finally, Nina Easton noted that the TTIP and TPP would grow the economy — something she can’t know because she’s never seen these secret monstrosities.

Fox News went to commercial, so I switched over to MSNBC just in time to see Steve “I’m more conservative every day hoping for a good gig in the 2016 election” Schmidt. He was arguing that ISIS was a far more important issue than public funding of child care. I suspect that’s true — for Steve Schmidt, who probably has a stay-at-home wife, but certainly has enough money to pay for child care. Gratefully, Chris Hayes countered him powerfully, noting that ISIS isn’t some kind of existential threat to the United States. Rachel Maddow, who may be suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s, came to Schmidt’s defense. But the kind of fear mongering that Schmidt was doing should be left to Fox News where it belongs.

The only other thing I saw was back over on Fox News after Joni Ernst. Everyone was respectful. They all agreed that at least she didn’t awkwardly grab a bottle of water and guzzle it in the middle of her talk. But it was clear they were shell-shocked. They understand better than anyone. When you have a political movement that is based upon taking away from the poorer classes and giving it to the rich, you need people like Ernst to convince the people that you aren’t really reptiles in human costumes. But really, I think a close watching of an hour and a half of Fox News will make you think that might just be true.

Oh: and Juan Williams was there too.

I thought that the first half hour of Obama’s State of the Union speech was really good. It was nice to see him so relaxed with an attitude that the Republicans could bite him if they had a problem. In fact, most of the speech seemed very much like the first speech of the Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign. And I’m fine with that. The president offered a number of good ideas. Of course, we know they will all come to nothing so long as Americans continue to stay home for off year elections.

The speech got a bit much at the end when Obama talked about working with the Republicans. This kind of act might have worked in 2008 and 2009, but that was only because Obama truly was naïve and actually believed it. But that’s not true anymore. Obama knows the score. But I know what he was doing. He was trying to shame the Republicans. This is something that I’ve been complaining about for the last six years. I don’t mind that Republicans disagree with me. In fact, I defended them after the 2012 election when centrists everywhere were claiming that the Republicans had to “moderate.” Republicans should do what their supporters want. But sadly, that isn’t what they do.

Ideas they’ve always been in favor of, they suddenly decide are socialism if a Democrat is in the White House. I understand that Obamacare was more liberal than what they wanted. But they weren’t willing to go with anything at all. In fact, the one idea that was absolutely theirs — the individual mandate — they have totally turned their back on. But much more important, they are against any kind of stimulus. They don’t believe in infrastructure spending. They don’t believe in anything that will help — as long as a Democrat is in the White House. And that’s shameful. But no amount of shaming from Obama is going to change the Republicans. They are far beyond shame.

Mixed in with all the good ideas that Obama talked about, was one terribly wrong idea:

This is a reference to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). These are terrible “trade” agreements. We know this because if they were good, they wouldn’t be negotiated in secret with the help of corporate lobbyists and the White House wouldn’t be requesting “fast track” authority so that no one will be able to really see what is inside it before a vote. It will doubtless be filled with sweet provisions for our corporate overlords. And I suspect that it is just a roundabout way for them to get the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) because they couldn’t get it through democratic means.

There are two ways to look at Obama’s push for this. Either he actually believes in it, which means that the soul of the Democratic Party has been destroyed. Or it is that Obama thinks he has to make public pronouncements about this kind of garbage for the sake of keeping corporate funders happy, which mean that the soul of the Democratic Party has been destroyed. It is just a travesty. These treaties (TTIP and TPP) are probably the only things that would make me quit the Democratic Party. And I don’t think I’m alone. If the party embraced this, it would make a lot of people just give up on partisan politics — not that many of us aren’t already very close as it is. (For the record, I’ve felt from the start that Obama has had this attitude towards people like me of, “Who else are you going to vote for?”)

But overall, it was a good speech. I like the idea of paying for junior college. Childcare, paid sick leave, equal pay, and an increased minimum wage are all good ideas. Unfortunately, they are all good ideas that the Republicans hate. So maybe the politics will look better at the beginning of 2017. Ultimately, that’s what it’s going to take: something like we had in 2009 for a very short period of time. I’m hopeful that we will get such a chance. I just doubt it will be in 2017. In fact, I suspect it will take a very bad period of Republican rule before we get there. But it is nice to know where we are headed.