It was another epic battle between Id and Nancy. The president opened with a leg drop, a piledrive, a powerslam, and a boot lace eye-rake. Avoiding the bronco buster, Nancy rebounded off the turnbuckles with a backhand chop and a leaping cactus clothesline, before deploying a triple jump moonsault, a flying heel kick, and a folding chair shot. OK, the State of the Kingdom address wasn’t quite as violent as big time wrestling, but it featured just about as much spectacle and reflected the mutual contempt between political parties that’s spreading faster than the Coronavirus. It began with Trump refusing to shake Nancy’s hand and ended with Nancy going full Jamie Summers on the president’s printed remarks. In between, there were chants of four more years (at first I thought people wanted that much time added to Trump’s sentence), a Parkland father being handcuffed and removed from the gallery, and Trump awarding the nation’s highest honor to Rush Limbaugh, who now shares that honor with Jonas Salk, Helen Keller, Neil Armstrong, and Mr. Rogers. Limbaugh was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by the First Lady shortly after announcing he was suffering from stage four lung cancer (I won’t speak ill of the ill, even though he would). In short, the president baited the speaker into tearing up his remarks, which baited the president into tweeting about that instead of his economic policy, which baited the media into covering the story, which baited me into baiting you to read about the whole mess here. Maybe all this bait is appropriate, because as far as I can tell, political decorum sleeps with the fishes. From The Atlantic: The State of the Union as Spectacle. (Don’t worry. This SOTU shall pass.)

+ SOTU-faced: Fortunately, words were secondary during the speech, because many of them were false. WaPo: Fact-checking President Trump’s 2020 State of the Union address. (Maybe he should have used SOTU-factor authentication…)