SOTU 2015 Thread January 20, 2015 tigtog Requested in the Open Thread: a thread just for discussing this years State Of The Union speech.
There are many more important things to discuss (and I have a couple I’ll bring up in the morning) but for the moment, this was the highlight. Here’s how one of the concluding sections of President Obama’s State of the Union on Tuesday night was supposed to go: “I have no more campaigns to run. My only agenda for the next two years is…” But what actually happened was that after “I have no more campaigns to run” Republicans started clapping derisively. And Obama responded with an ad-lib that will likely go down in State of the Union history: “I know, because I won both of them.”
I seriously can’t believe it’s considered acceptable for members of the opposition party to behave like that during the state of the union. Can anyone imagine what would have happened in the right-wing noise machine if Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein did the same thing during a SOTU in Bush’s second term?
I know it was a long-shot hope, but I was still hoping the fact Emma Sulkowicz — i.e. the mattress-carrying rape survivor from Columbia — was invited to attend President Obama’s SOTU meant the SOTU might actually mention Title IX or campus obstruction of rape investigations. Surely those are serious enough to merit a shout-out? (Yes, I realise Sulkowicz was invited by Senator Gillibrand, not President Obama, and Obama posted his speech online for all to read before he delivered it. But a cynical feminist can always hope!)