To those who watched Joni Ernst's State of the Union response, you saw a full denial of reality.
Did Joni Ernst RESPOND at all to what Obama said in her response? No. She essentially talked right over his speech.
How is it a response when you don't even respond to the words you just heard? Joni Ernst essentially answered Obama's statements by instead not acknowledging they happened but by answering a wholly unasked question of her own invention. The GOP as a whole didn't even hear what Obama had just said. Their canned response(s) were simply folksy platitudes answering the question no one was asking, and that question was "I wonder what is on Fox News right now?"
This wasn't a GOP response to a speech the Democratic President had just made on the State of our Union, this was a five minute infomercial on what the GOP wants to appear like. And even then they still failed. What I learned about the GOP from Joni Ernst is a folksy tale about Joni Ernst, a mishmash of talking points targeted solely at the GOP base and a bunch of nothing.
If this is all the GOP has in an election where people actually show up to vote they are screwed. Their response to a question about the state of reality in America is to say "Yeah, but the real problem is {Insert folksy GOP platitude here}"
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Because if you actually WATCHED the President's state of the union instead of watching Fox News until the GOP "response" came on you would see a GOP that can't even cheer GOOD NEWS for America because (gasp) a Democratic Presdient might get credit for it. That same guy who you blamed the bad economy on is now presiding over an economy that for 99% of us is slightly less bad, but watch Obama say "This is Good News" for America and the GOP response is to sit on their hands a grumble. That's pathetic.
If you actually watched the State of the Union you would see a older white and mostly male homogenous gaggle of Republican lawmakers who can not applaud good news like "We aren't totally fucked anymore" or "We aren't dying and going bankrupt because insurers totally screwed us anymore". Why? Because if the GOP ever admits that we aren't actually as totally fucked anymore as we were under Jeb Bush's idiot brother they may have to acknowledge the reality that Barack Obama deserves some credit for that. I know, I know, I lost the entire GOP at the word reality.
And that is where the state of our union actually stands today. It gets better. It is getting better, slowly, painfully slowly, but we aren't in the total free fall we were in when Obama took this job from George W Bush, and the GOP simply can not accept that reality. Senator Hogclipper's folksly and encapsulated GOP infomercial belies that fact. Our country is getting better little by little despite what the GOP says or is. Reality is getting better, step by step, little by little, except in places where Republicans have a majority, like in Kansas or Wisconsin or New Jersey. And that's what the GOP really wants, super awesome fun time for billionaires and too hell with the other 99% of Kansas, and if they can control Congress and the White House, America. The state of our union finds us in a place where only one of the two parties accept reality, and the other invents their own reality and just makes shit up, there is no such thing as pollution or lower unemployment or less people going uninsured and/or bankrupt, sure things still need a lot of work, but it IS getting better slowly. And if the GOP ever admits that, and admits that maybe Obama was right about some of this stuff how will they keep distorting reality to their base that Obama is a lawless tyrant dictator and worst president ever?
The State of our Union, after the dust of speeches and responses is cleared, is that America has one sane party with a President that is much bolder than his Democratic congressional allies on the whole and we have one insane cult that calls itself Conservative that has completely divorced itself from reality to maintain an agenda for of and by the 1% and the slack-jawed dead-enders they pander to.
Obamacare isn't a "failed law". Perfect? No, but hardly failed. The Keystone Pipeline will not single-handedly fix the economy unless you are in the oil spill containment industry five years from now. When Obama asks the GOP about income inequality there answer is "Something something {Insert foksy platitudes and GOP talking points here}". And that was what Sen. Ernst's 'response" was. She wasn't responding to the speech President Obama gave that we all heard 5 minutes before, she was responding to the world she lives in in the reality that exists only in the never-ending outrage of the factless Republican mind.
If you can't cheer good news for America because a Democratic President gave you that good news you are a hack partisan. And that is all the GOP really is at this point, hack partisans who have tried from day 1 to hurt this President EVEN IF it hurt America too, just so they could win cheap political points and a return to office. When cast in that light the State of our Union is still pretty fucked when one of the two major political parties in America are such petty partisan hacks that they can't even cheer for what is good for our Union when they were hoping so badly that it would fail.
