Opinion

If the planet manages to survive the stupidity of its dominant species, future generations will look back in astonishment on the fact that American businesses paid tens of millions of dollars each year to a swinish, cigar-smoking hatemonger who spewed stupidity, misogyny, racism, and fear to a coast-to-coast radio audience of troglodytes who prided themselves on being Dittoheads, unable to think for themselves, and perfectly content to let Rush "think" for them.

Weirdly enough, Tuesday night wasn't the first time a president delivered a State of the Union address in the middle of his impeachment trial. Back in 1999, Bill Clinton delivered one in the same circumstances. It's hard to believe the timing would work out almost exactly the same way but it did.

The only sounds were those of muffled drums, the shuffling of feet and the gentle sobs of some of the estimated 20,000 onlookers. The women and children wore all white. The men dressed in black.

An impeached president who was on trial and is up for re-election will be delivering a state of the union address to the most divided union in living memory. He will be giving his address to both his jurors and prosecutors, and most importantly, to the voters that will decide his fate in November.

For whatever reason, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has still failed to wrap up his sham impeachment trial of Donald Trump, denying his orange overlord the much-anticipated acquittal that Trump clearly wished to trumpet. And so it was that Trump took to the House chamber on Tuesday night, one day short of his kangaroo exoneration, to give the annual State of the Union or, as I like to call it, the Sniffing Olympics.

While Rush Limbaugh is currently under fire for his unchecked misogyny and sexism, another running theme of Limbaugh's broadcast career has been hostility towards racial and ethnic minorities. This antagonism, often expressed obliquely via coded language and other dog whistles, became more explicit with the election of Barack Obama.

Hacking into voting machines remains far too easy.

Going into the Iowa caucuses Monday night, the stakes felt sky-high compared even to other dramatic years, like 2016 or 2008. Even though, realistically speaking, the differences between how the Democratic candidates would govern as president are pretty small, the large field, combined with the urgent need to beat Donald Trump in November plus still-lingering anger over the way the 2016 primaries played out, had tensions running high.

Donald Trump's Ukraine plot, for which he's on the verge of being acquitted by the U.S. Senate, never would have happened at all were it not for Attorney General Bill Barr's manipulation of the Robert Mueller investigation.

One Democratic presidential candidate has won the Iowa caucuses. But because of an epic project management failure, we likely won't know who that winner is until sometime late Tuesday — at best.

It ought to be an interesting task for Donald Trump’s speechwriter – presuming that Trump decides to stick with a script for the State of the Union address tonight before the same Congress that is hearing his impeachment.

Five years ago Don Lemon was a functional punchline.  A profile in GQ magazine had a field day with a detail shared by the interviewer, that he pronounced sorbet with a hard "T" – and in fact, was insistent on doing so. Back then if the "CNN Tonight" anchor broke his composure on air, it would have been no big deal. People would have expected it, in fact.

Good old Lamar! That would be Sen. Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee — known for that exclamation point after his name, his plaid shirts and his quixotic presidential campaigns. Well, Lamar! threw his reputation and legacy into the fetid compost heap of Donald Trump's presidency last Friday. Alexander is retiring after this term, so I guess Republicans figured he was the most expendable human sacrifice to step into the breach and betray his oath by casting the deciding vote refusing to hear witnesses in the president's impeachment trial.