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On her show Wednesday night, Rachel Maddow dissected the Republicans’ response to Pres. Obama’s State of the Union speech and found that it was even worse than it first appeared:
Maddow says the tea party response came off like amateur hour on cable access once again because, as was the case in years past, their technical people could not get the camera to line up with the teleprompter. As a result, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky appeared to be looking off to the side while he delivered his address. There is irony here in that it was tea baggers like Sarah Palin, who though thoroughly addicted to teleprompters herself, repeatedly mocked then-Sen. Obama for using them during the 2008 presidential campaign.
Maddow also reports that the White House punked Rubio and his speech writers by not releasing the final version of the speech until minutes before the president took the podium. Because Rubio’s writers had no time to make adjustments, his speech was loaded with rebuttals to things the president had not said.
Even worse, Rubio botched his party’s first opportunity to distance itself from Mitt Romney’s disastrous campaign last year. Instead of what Maddow called “de-Romneyfication,” Rubio doubled down on Rommey’s unpopular positions — first by voting against the Violence against Women Act earlier in the day — and then by doubling down on trickle down economics, praising Medicare in one breath and then promising to kill it in the next and then lying about his home in a middle-class neighborhood, which is currently for sale for $675,000.
No wonder Rubio was overcome with cotton mouth.
The transcript to Maddow’s commentary is on Page 2:
