Mr. Trump stayed on-message and on-script. An awkward skipped-handshake moment with Speaker Pelosi at the beginning may have prompted her omission of "I have the high privilege and distinct honor of..." from her introduction of the President. And she capped it at the end of his speech by tearing up her copy of the text. During the speech, she did applaud a few times, interspersed with rather a lot of grimacing and mouthed phrases, quite unbefitting to the decorum of her office and role.
Is this the same Speaker of the House who shushed her fellow Democrats for cheering the announcement that the House would seek to impeach Mr. Trump? It seems petty. Did she expect him to come out in sackcloth and ashes? You'd think she'd know the man better than that by now.
I'll give her this, she managed to make Representatives Maxine Waters and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (and a few of their peers) look positively diplomatic in boycotting the event: why show up if you're only going to mug disapproval (especially if you can issue a solemn-sounding tweet instead)?
It was a well-delivered speech, carefully stage-managed and generally successful. I continue to doubt that U. S. Presidents have quite as much influence over the economy as they have all claimed since at least FDR, but Mr. Trump is no different from his predecessors in that regard.
The next time the seats in the House of Representatives are re-upholstered, can we lobby them to not use a "Greek key" pattern? I don't care how historical it is, I'm tired of handing fuel to the idiots on the Left and the Right, who look at the intersection points and draw entirely the wrong conclusion.
Many of the Democrat Congresswomen wore white, in honor of women's suffrage and the 19th Amendment, ratified in 1920. The TV commentators took note of it, but missed something more subtle. On wide shots, I began to notice odd colors on the men.
Red and blue are popular necktie colors among male politicians, and various versions of the yellow "power tie" are a perennial favorite. You can expect those three colors to predominate. But audience shots showed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was wearing a bright purple tie, then cut to Representative Jerry Nadler, who was wearing a tie of a particularly bilious green hue. This seemed unusual, and I kept watch for anything similar. Across both parties, a plurality of the Congressmen were wearing purple or green ties -- and those colors are not-so-coincidentally the other colors of the Women's Suffrage movement. Most often seen on a sash or scarf, or as the outside bands of a three-striped ribbon.
This is a crowd that knows symbolism. They didn't pick those ties (or, possibly, their wives didn't pick those ties for them) by accident. It was a nice touch.
1 comment:
He who takes green is green and follows green leader. He who takes purple is purple and follows purple leader.
... Makes about as much sense as most of our politics....
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