Short version: Barack Obama gave his last ever State of the Union address last night.  It was, unsurprisingly, not particularly good except in a negative sense: you’ll never hear Barack Obama give one, ever again. If you skipped it… well, I envy you.

To elaborate:

The good:

This is the last State of the Union speech that Barack Obama will ever do.  You have to be commended, my friends: you have survived.  Tell truthful: you thought that you would succumb by now.  You thought that Barack Obama would raise your gorge to lethal levels. But you survived.  He has done his last State of the Union, and You. Are. Still. Here.

The bad:

Come, I will conceal nothing from you: the President put his speech out ahead of time, so we all knew where this was going well in advance.  There was so much that awful about this speech, both domestic (focusing on climate change was frankly absurd) and foreign; but there was one particular passage that was frankly fascinating in its utter tone-deafness.

I told you earlier all the talk of America’s economic decline is political hot air. Well, so is all the rhetoric you hear about our enemies getting stronger and America getting weaker. The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. It’s not even close. We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined. Our troops are the finest fighting force in the history of the world. No nation dares to attack us or our allies because they know that’s the path to ruin. Surveys show our standing around the world is higher than when I was elected to this office, and when it comes to every important international issue, people of the world do not look to Beijing or Moscow to lead — they call us.

Meanwhile, in the real world? Well you know perfectly well what happened in the real world; the Iranian regime apparently grabbed ten of our sailors, and Barack Obama didn’t even give them the courtesy of reminding the Iranians of Teddy Roosevelt’s rule of thumb in such situations. Which is to say: either give us the guys who got grabbed, alive; or the guys who grabbed them, dead. But, hey, he wanted to talk up normalizing relations with Cuba! …And, again, climate change. Because that’s apparently a foreign policy issue of greater importance than captured American troops.

The ugly:

And then there was this.

Last year, Vice President Biden said that with a new moonshot, America can cure cancer. Last month, he worked with this Congress to give scientists at the National Institutes of Health the strongest resources they’ve had in over a decade. Tonight, I’m announcing a new national effort to get it done. And because he’s gone to the mat for all of us, on so many issues over the past forty years, I’m putting Joe in charge of Mission Control. For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the family we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all.

…Came out of nowhere, huh? I mean, the rest of the domestic stuff was pretty obnoxious, but at least you could see it coming a mile away.  This one was totally out of left field.  On the other hand, it’s not like Joe Biden can actually do anything for or against cancer research anyway. On the gripping hand? Dude should have totally got into this race.

To sum up: this is the State of the Union address that the country largely deserved, honestly.  The country voted this man in twice, and that’s something that we’re going to have to live with for the rest of our lives.  If there is a fourth takeaway to this speech, it is this: we must never let a man like Barack Obama be President, ever again. You do not have the luxury of shrugging things like this off. If you do not take politics and your duties as a citizen seriously, this is what we will have to face.

Forever.