Who's up for a heaping helping of nationally-televised platitudes and tendentious hectoring from a lame duck president, whose unoriginal remarks promoting intellectually bereft ideas will be interrupted frequently by rounds of grating applause? If this sounds to you like a fate worse than, well, this, rest assured that you're not alone; feel free to skip the speech as a matter of constitutional principle, or watch it with friends as a means of heavy alcohol intake. Team Townhall is absolutely on board -- stone sober, no less -- because it is our job to be up for such things. The bare bones basics:
Who: President Barack Obama
What: The State of the Union Address
Where: The US House of Representatives chamber, multiple broadcast and cable networks
When: 9:00 pm Eastern
Why: Tradition, established by George Washington, then re-established by Woodrow Wilson
The president will speak just after 9 pm ET, directly confronting the new heavily-Republican Congress for the first time since the election he prefers to ignore. He'll eagerly tout the mending economy, then call for a raft of new tax increases and government spending. These proposals will go nowhere, a fact of which the president is keenly aware. The goal is class warfare posture, not governance or cooperation. He's more or less trolling at this point. Upon his conclusion, newly-elected Iowa Senator Joni Ernst will deliver the official GOP response. The selection of Ernst was, in many ways, a no-brainer: She's a charismatic, likable, female military veteran who just won comfortably in a major battleground state carried twice by Obama. Left-wing special interest groups who presume to speak on behalf of all women are preemptively savaging Ernst as insufficiently "pro-woman," of course:
Hmm... @emilyslist statement on Ernst giving GOP SOTO response pic.twitter.com/kC6XhB1Il2
— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) January 16, 2015A member of the House Republican leadership team and a duly-elected United States Senator are mere "window dressing," you see, because the GOP fails "to offer any policies that appeal to women" -- which may come as news to the 48 percent of women who voted Republican last fall. What a nasty and demeaning little statement. In fact, Ernst (and McMorris-Rodgers, for that matter) are far more in touch with most women than EMILY's List on the very issue that animates that extremist organization: Taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand throughout all nine months of pregnancy. According to the abortion zealots, Joni Ernst flunks the "pro-woman" test because she rejects a radical stance that repulses a large majority of American women. But Ernst won't be discussing abortion, I'd imagine. She'll likely focus on protecting the homeland, fostering economic growth, creating jobs and controlling the national debt -- top issues for all Americans, including women. We'll be watching it all, starting with the very first standing ovation. Follow our live tweets below, and please do contribute your running thoughts in the comments section: