If you read the entirety of Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech, and then listened to him deliver it, it had the feel of a nursing home patient trying to remember a laundry list.

And the laundry list had nothing good in it, so it was best to just shoot everything off rapid-fire and at a louder than normal volume. And the clapping seals Democrats were more than prepared to cheer on their figurehead-in-chief.

Schumer timing his applause wrong is the cringiest thing I've ever seen pic.twitter.com/Zs4iSkDCDk

— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) March 2, 2022

So it was up to the GOP to bring some reality and levity to this moment. Republican Governor Kim Reynolds of Iowa represented the GOP with the official rebuttal to the State of the Union. Compared to Biden’s manic delivery, Reynolds was calm and deliberate as she listed the failures of the Biden administration. And we’re only one year in, God help us all.

Governor Reynolds hit Biden hard on foreign policy. Did you realize that the only time Joe Biden mentioned the word “Afghanistan” was in reference to burn pits and his son Beau’s cancer, and VA health care? The GOP was not going to let Biden get away with that.

On foreign policy, the Iowa Republican called the US withdrawal from Afghanistan under Biden’s watch “disastrous.” Referencing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Reynolds called for unity and solidarity with Ukraine, but argued, “we shouldn’t ignore what happened in the run-up to Putin’s invasion.”

“Weakness on the world stage has a cost, and the President’s approach to foreign policy has consistently been too little too late,” she said.

“We can’t project strength abroad if we’re weak at home,” she said, charging that Biden and his party “have spent the last year either ignoring the issues facing Americans or making them worse.”

Foreign policy is one of the few things any administration owns by itself, and Biden needs to have the albatross of his Afghanistan failures hung around his neck for all time.

The other thing that got a lot less press than it did a year ago? COVID-19. Yes, Biden mentioned it in his plea for more vaccinations (while completely skipping over his attempt to shove a vaccine mandate down the American public’s throat that got rejected by the Supreme Court, and then quietly dropped), but if you think the American parents have forgotten the pain and struggle of the last two years, you are gravely mistaken. The GOP intends to make itself the party of parents, and between Glenn Youngkin’s election in Virginia and tonight’s speech, they are making it into a campaign strategy.

Reynolds also went after Democrats over their handling of the pandemic nationwide and cited her own record on the issue. The Iowa governor has made a name for herself as a proponent of limiting government mandates amid the pandemic and Republican congressional leaders praised her handling of Covid-19 when they announced she would deliver the GOP response.”

“Republican governors faced the same Covid-19 virus head on, but we honored your freedoms and saw right away that lockdowns and school closures, they came with their own significant costs; that mandates weren’t the answer,” she said.”

“What happened and is still happening to our children over the last two years is unconscionable: learning loss, isolation, anxiety, depression. In so many states, our kids have been left behind and many will never catch up,” she added.”

An even more blunt response to Biden’s State of the Union speech was given by Daily Wire Editor Emeritus and podcast host Ben Shapiro. Even though this wasn’t an official GOP response, it probably should have been. Governor Reynolds was a lot nicer than Ben Shapiro was, but sometimes, harsh truths are better for us all.

Ladies and gentlemen, we gather here tonight to mourn the state of our nation. Because the state of our nation is pathetic.”

And it is pathetic, in the main, because of the President of the United States.”

As it turns out, we all should have listened to Barack Obama.”

In 2020, former President Obama said something simple yet profound about his former vice president, a man he had labeled his “brother.”

He said, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to F things up.”

Barack Obama was right.”

Shapiro didn’t have to be polite or watch his tone. He’s not running for office. So instead, we listened to the consequences of, as Kamala Harris so eloquently put it, voters getting “what they asked for.” I neither voted for this nor asked for it, and yet, here we are.

We are more than a year into Joe Biden’s presidency. That year is an unblemished record of failure, viciousness, and lies.”

Too many Americans have been told by the radical Left and its compliant lackeys in the media that America is rooted in racism and bigotry, that freedom is dangerous, that if we listen to the “experts” and delegate control over our lives to them, all will be well. Too many Americans listened.”

And so we are in the midst of a great American decline.”

But that decline is reversible. It starts now. Attend your local school board meetings, demand an end to the radical indoctrination of your children. Join campaigns in your cities and states for candidates who care about your rights. Vote Joe Biden’s enablers out of Congress and the Senate in November. And then, vote Joe Biden out of office in 2024. The great American renewal begins when their control of American lives ends.”

If American parents and American patriots are “mad as hell, and not going to take this anymore,” then they know what to do. The ballot box is our recourse. Joe Biden is functionally a lame duck president, but voters can make him an official one in November, along with taking back the House and hopefully the Senate to stymie any more “transformational” legislation. Democrats are up to 31 House members who have announced retirement. They know what’s coming. Let’s make sure we are heard through our votes in November.

Featured image via chayka1270 on Pixabay, cropped, Pixabay license