It’s not been a great start of 2020 for the Democrats

Let us call it Trump’s night of props. It was also a night that demonstrated how rude the president of the United States is. And how the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who is charged with inviting the president to the House chamber to give his annual State of the Union, returned the president’s indecency after he refused to shake her outstretched hand.

At the end of the night, after 80 minutes of Trump informing the world how wonderful he is, how much better we’ve become because of him, how he saved the country from Obama’s economy, how he’s improved the nation’s healthcare system (while helping to privatize it at the expense of the needy), how powerful our multi-trillion dollar armed forces now are (including a new space force), how benevolent Donald Trump is by granting a little African American girl’s wish to attend a “better” school by dissing the country’s public educational system in favor of a private education, by surprising a mother with two babies missing their deployed overseas soldier-husband and delivering the father to an emotional wife in the audience, by honoring a 100-year-old Tuskegee airmen, also in the audience with his grandson, catapulting him to Brigadier General… well, you get the idea.  

Trump also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, who like Trump, never met a political opponent he is not willing to denigrate, insult, and threaten over the air waves. Rush is the “great American” who once called a then-graduate student Sandra Fluke  a “slut” and “prostitute” on his show for supporting President Barack Obama’s health care law.

The award now puts Limbaugh on par with recipients like Mother Theresa. Go figure. A man who once answered a black caller to his show by stating: “Take that bone out of your nose and call me back.” And another time said, also on air: “Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?”  

The president also saluted Juan Güaido, in the audience on Tuesday, as the legitimate president of Venezuela. (Americans can be so gullible…) or maybe they really believe the idea that they are “exceptional.” Even Pelosi and most Democrats stood up and applauded Güaido — standing and looking sternly at the adoring crowd while putting both hands together as if in prayer. 

“I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.” – American humorist Will Rogers

I guess you could call this a moment when the truth of what has happened in this country was in full view: a president who considers himself a king anointing an illegitimate president of a country the U.S. feels it owns because it is Latin America (remember the Monroe Doctrine), and anyway they have plenty of oil reserves that belong to US, whether they like it or not.

By the end of the president’s State of the Union speech, a stoic Nancy Pelosi, who’d sat through it with lips so tightly shut they could have turned blue, and not even a slight smile on her face, had had enough. As Trump concluded, Pelosi could be seen behind the president tearing up the paper version of the speech delivered to her by the president. 

Nevertheless, as Trump continues to lie to the gullible American public in order to gain their support in November, Democrats were in the process of finishing up with the debacle known as an impeachment hearing on one side of the country, while dealing with a meltdown in the Iowa caucus, where days after its termination we still don’t really know who won. And this after a full year of preparations for the beginning of the end of the Trump era.

I guess for those of us who believe in truth, justice and that oh-so-fictional American way, it’s not been a good start of 2020.