Hook, line, and sinker

Cheers and jeers, pontification and pouts, hype and hyperbole and hyperventilation…bait offered and taken.

The state of our union, as again shown this week, was and is both predictably status quo and truly fascinating to observe.

I am no politician. I can’t fake any emotion or feign support for anything or anyone I disdain to save my life. But in a hall teeming with slick actors to master manipulators who make a living off of doing just that, it is something else to watch the ego of personal politics usurp all necessary else.

It’s hard to believe that the following bare minimum common sense must be explained to people who make decisions for our country, let alone drive on the same streets. Yet here we still are.

When it comes to this, or any other, administration’s work, people aren’t ever going to be completely satisfied. Most people won’t be half satisfied with any administration. And many will never be satisfied at all.

No one is special in this regard.

The problem, and the reason for how we got to the state of this disjointed union, is because too many think that they are.

And so once again on full display was the hubris that personal ideology overrides collective, professional responsibility. Dislike of the current commander-in-chief allows for heckling and screams, disagreement with policy is reason to skip the entire speech en masse. And the need to resist the despised ass at the podium provides not only a right but a duty to become an even bigger one.

The hitch in such tantrum behavior is that it never actually hurts the target of their loathing whatsoever…it only ever hurts their own image and interests. And let’s be honest: this administration knows that tendency and truth full well, and, for a second year, set Democrats up for some very public failure, which their members happily walked into.

The media has since labeled this a ploy, and they aren’t exactly wrong. The “regime” fully banked on Democrat ego and seized the chance to capitalize on the embarrassingly inevitable, serving up on a silver platter missed opportunity after missed opportunity to salvage face, as well as opportunity after opportunity to step into shit.

The simple reality, and therefore brilliance, is that none of these should have been issues tainted with partisanship. They were universal tragedies to be universally acknowledged, or universal successes to be universally celebrated. But contrary to their projecting accusations, the Democrats chose to uphold politics over these issues, willingly punishing Americans of all backgrounds in the quest to punish a certain one.

The thing is, not standing for the victims of blatant, needless crime doesn’t undermine Trump, but it does undermine the dead’s memory and their surviving families. Hook.

Not cheering for heroic Americans doesn’t show less support for Trump, but it does show that one doesn’t support such sacrifice in the name of our country. Line.

And, as has been and will continue to be plastered across screens through November, not finding a way to get to one’s feet to confirm that the first duty of the American government is indeed to protect American citizens doesn’t negatively affect Trump in the least, but it does negatively affect one’s credibility in serving said citizens.

Sinker.

In an all too easy opportunity to set aside pettiness for duty, and a chance to demonstrate that it is definitively possible to put American interests over hate for Trump, the party simply could not rise to the occasion. While they may not have wanted to play into the Donald show, they absolutely played themselves.

But when it comes down to it, Democrats aren’t just hurting themselves with such juvenile attitudes and games. They’re hurting their own constituents, trading real world issues for the narcissistic production of which they accuse others. All of these “public servants” deeply hope that Trump utterly fails, knowing that also means Americans will fail…yet as we’ve come to realize, that is a perfectly acceptable risk for the ultimate political prize.

Unfortunately for the party, they’re not only losing the plot, but the public as well, as a not-insignificant portion of their base has been waking up to their apparent expendability. Watching repeated scorn for 80/20 issues and neglect for fundamental humanity is a constant reminder for why many non-Republican voters made Republican victories so easy. Serious doubt and reservations have been instilled in the more moderate wing. Independents are being pushed away permanently. And any remaining respect across the aisle is withering to nothing. All in all, Democrats could not be making this any easier for those whom they hate.

More than any other takeaway from the event, the Democratic Party continues to prove they still have taken nothing away from their past failures. And after over a year of pretending to take stock of it all and autopsy their failures in the name of wanting to learn what went wrong…they genuinely have zero honest desire to do so or to even want to know.

I wrote in 2022 that this very ideological behavior would lose them the White House and more in the following election, and I’ll state again that Democrats will never regain standing until they come down from the clouds and learn to prioritize actual people over ideas of them. Until they finally figure out that the country desires and deserves more than just hollow performance. And until they can rally around something to genuinely stand for, not simply against.

Until then, they are free to boo, sulk, scream, and ignore everyone in the room and across the nation who they just can’t manage to lend a hand or concern, if tarnished by He Who Must Not Be Named. They’ll have to genuinely determine if that method is truly working out for them. They’d better not take too long, however, lest the rest of us determine that it just might be working out better for us.