First van in the new place, guys. Hold on tight.
Update: Van closed. Thanks to all for being here.
The minute the speech ended Wolf and Jake Tapper fell all over themselves to declare that it was just a bunch of words, and Republicans would be mean about it, and wasn’t this all just about 2016 anyway. Speeches are a bunch of words. It’s true.
But imagine for a moment President John McCain up there. Imagine President Mitt Romney. Hell, you don’t have to imagine George W. Bush’s state of the union speeches. We lived through them:
We’ve got the terrorists on the run. We’re keeping them on the run. One by one the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice.
As we fight this war, we will remember where it began: here, in our own country. This government is taking unprecedented measures to protect our people and defend our homeland.
We’ve intensified security at the borders and ports of entry, posted more than 50,000 newly trained federal screeners in airports, begun inoculating troops and first responders against smallpox, and are deploying the nation’s first early warning network of sensors to detect biological attack.
And this year, for the first time, we are beginning to field a defense to protect this nation against ballistic missiles.
Contrast that with words about courage and hope and community, about the things we need to do for each other in order to be a country, in order to work and live. Words aren’t nothing, and tonight everybody heard that we need to be bigger, not smaller. We used to want to hear that a hell of a lot more than we do now, and that’s not nothing.
A.