This is exhausting. It is why I dreaded another Trump term, even though re-electing the Democrats after they had so disgraced themselves with the Joe Biden administration was, n my view, indefensible. I don’t want to keep writing about all this crap: Trump’s habitual excesses and rhetorical hyperbole, the partisan factchecking, the Axis news media propaganda, the absurd spectacle of Fox News gleefully spinning everything Trump of the Republicans do as marvelous while CNN and MSNBC give the public stony expressions and unrestrained hatred of the elected President of the United States; the increasingly unhinged conduct of Democrats, and the pathetic declarations of Trump Derangement by my Facebook friends (How did that February 28 boycott work out for you, morons?) The State of the Union debacle and its aftermath showed that while some of this has moderated from Trump’s first term in office, its not nearly enough. Will it really be this way for all four years? I see no reason to hope that it won’t be.

I accumulated over a dozen episodes and articles that would support individual post here related to the aftermath of Trump’s speech, and I don’t feel like writing any of them. I’ll touch on some in what follows, a random set of largely disgusted notes and observations….

1. Did you notice that suddenly the news media decided not to call Trump’s State of the Union address, and, retroactively, all previous SOTUs, a State of the Union Address but rather an “Address to Joint Session of Congress”? From what central authority did that edict issue? When an anti-Trump talking head decided that whataboutism was the best defense of Rep. Green acting like an asshole and getting thrown out of chamber, he said that Rep. Joe Walsh had shouted “You lie!” during one of Obama’s addresses to a joint session of Congress. “Huh!” I thought. “That’s funny, I thought that happened during a State of the Union address!” I had to check. Did the news media frame the speech this way to make the upcoming Democratic tantrum seem less outrageous—you know, this was just one of those joint session thingies, nothing special, like say, the traditional joint session called “The State of the Union”? At this point, I trust our journalism so little that it wouldn’t surprise me.

2. I read this morning that Democrats are anonymously telling reporters that their leadership let them down by not giving clearer guidance about how their members of Congress were supposed to act during Trump’s speech. These sources are “furious” because the ludicrous behavior of the party became the main story-line, and the public’s reaction to it was overwhelmingly negative. They needed someone to tell them that screaming at the President, carrying little paddles and wearing costumes, refusing to applaud or show approval of even the unequivocally positive developments the President mentioned, and sitting and scowling as Trump introduced a young cancer survivor wasn’t going to look good?

3. The New York Times’ completely anti-Trump coverage of the speech included two of its stable of Trump-hating pundits, Binyamin Appelbaum and Michelle Goldberg, calling Green’s hysterics the highlight of the night, and in a good way. A large number of the Axis talking heads and print pundits argued that the Democrats should have boycotted the entire speech by the man who doesn’t respect democratic norms, like, say, the State of the Union address.

4. It was hilarious watching CNN and MSNBC tie themselves into knots trying to spin the CBS poll that indicated three out of every four viewers approved of Trump’s speech, even though only 51% of the viewers identified as Republicans. The poll was misleading, see, because the vast number of Americans who think Trump is Satan or Hitler didn’t tune in. But 1) they would have hated the speech no matter what he said, and 2) the poll still showed that 75% of the viewers who did see the speech reacted positively.

5. MSNBC’s supposedly Republican Nicolle Wallace won the prize as the ugly face of the news media’s hatred of Trump when, while talking to Rachel Maddow, sneered at the 13-year-old boy, Devarjaye “DJ” Daniel, who was honored by President Trump after recovering from a brain tumor and multiple surgeries, saying of the kid’s stated hope of being a police officer, “I hope he has a long life as a law enforcement officer, but I hope he never has to defend the United States and Capitol against Donald Trump’s supporters. And if he does, I hope he isn’t one of the six who loses his life to suicide. And I hope he isn’t one who has to testify against the people who carried out acts of seditious conspiracy and then lives to see Donald Trump pardon those people.” Nice! Maddow, of course, just nodded along as if trying to tie the Capitol riot to the State of the Union speech made any sense at all.

6. And, of course, there were the “factcheckers.” I really don’t have the stomach to counter-factcheck these openly biased hacks any more, especially since Trump’s hyperbolic rhetoric, as always, can usually be legitimately flagged as “misleading,” “exaggerated,” or “lacking context.” The ethical problem, also as always, is that these “factcheckers’ never employ the same standards with Democrats, or, more importantly, their own employers’ reporters and pundits. Of coure, they are also all Democrats.

Here’s WaPo Factchecker Glenn Kessler’s dog’s breakfast of a factcheck on Trump’s speech: I started to go through it with a red pencil, but realized separating Kessler’s spin from Trump’s sloppy rhetoric might kill me. Here’s a minor but typical example, on the President’s brief reprise of what he has been saying about why the U.S. should take back the Panama Canal:

Trump: “But it was built at tremendous cost of American blood and treasure. 38,000 workers died building the Panama Canal. They died of malaria. They died of snakebites and mosquitoes.”

Trump’s estimate of 38,000 dead is exaggerated. The accepted estimate is fewer than 6,000, mainly from injury and disease. Many were not Americans. Black workers, including many West Indians, by some estimates were nearly four times more likely to die than White workers. An earlier French effort to build a canal (when Panama was still a province of Colombia) led to the death of 22,000, many from malaria and yellow fever.

Ugh. Trump’s point was that United States paid to build the canal and a lot of American workers died doing it. Why is Kessler arguing about “estimates”? 6,000 or 38,000, it’s still a lot of deaths. What does the “fact” that “by some estimates” West Indians were four times more likely to die building the canal than white workers have to do with anything? The misleading “facts” don’t materially change the thrust of the President’s point, and almost all of Kessler’s critiques are similar, or worse.

God, I’m sick of this.