“It was like having a very good seat at a very bad sporting event,” said House Speaker Kevin McCarthy after President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address last night. In a nutshell, McCarthy captured the contradictions that became thematic throughout Biden’s speech.

As usual, we can’t possibly address every lie the president told because they were too numerous. The economy, immigration, crime, foreign policy, partisanship in Washington — everything Biden said was counter to the glaring reality we all see before us. Then again, Biden is what he himself calls a “lying dog-faced pony soldier.” The truth simply isn’t in him. His last SOTU was chock-full of lies, and this one was no different.

To hear Biden tell it, everything was a disaster when he showed up in 2021, and he’s done incredible work — often with the help of “my Republican friends” — to fix just about everything. But he didn’t just show up in 2021; as he later boasted, he’d served in Washington longer than virtually anyone in the room — all but four of the last 50 years, to be exact. While he bragged about all the bipartisanship he’s supposedly brought to town, he acknowledged that “Democrats had to go it alone” on some things. Those just happened to be the biggest things, like the inflation bomb known as the American Rescue Plan.

In fact, as has been his wont since his Inaugural Address, he talked a lot about “unity” and how “time and again, Democrats and Republicans came together.” For once, he didn’t even use “MAGA” as a pejorative. But he also falsely attacked Republicans on a number of fronts throughout the speech, and he promised to heroically block their proposals that he disingenuously framed.

As expected, Biden struggled to read the teleprompter, though it seemed to us that last night was even worse than usual. He garbled numerous lines, including congratulating Chuck Schumer as the Senate minority leader. Oops.

Some of his struggles might be explained by his deliberate and probably planned attempts to ad lib. One of those attempts drew a big unintended laugh. Biden veered off script to talk about conversations he’s supposedly had with oil executives. To continue McCarthy’s sports analogy, it was as if he scored an own goal. He recounted that the executives told him, “We’re afraid you’re gonna shut down all the oil wells and all the, uh, oil refineries anyway, so why should we invest in them?” He says he tried to assuage their concern by replying, “We’re gonna need oil for at least another decade.”

That line drew both boos and hysterical laugher from Republicans because he just proved the fears of the oil executives to be well founded.

Because everyone hates high gas prices, he has to pretend like he’s not responsible. Despite his statistical cherry-picking — “Gas prices are down $1.50 a gallon since their peak” — we know that a gallon cost $2.39 when he took office and it’s $3.45 today and trending upward. That’s because Biden’s much-ballyhooed transition to “green” energy includes a war on fossil fuels.

He pawned gas prices and inflation off on Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine. He sounded less like a president than Jenny’s abusive boyfriend in “Forrest Gump” — “It’s this war and that lyin’ son of a b**ch Johnson!” The war in Europe is a factor, true, but rising prices were a major problem months before that invasion, and they were a problem largely caused by Democrat policies.

Economically, “We’re better positioned than any country on Earth right now,” he insisted. Americans see the malaise around us — rampant inflation, rising interest rates, persistent supply chain issues, etc. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll finds that 41% of Americans say they are financially worse off since Biden became president — the highest in almost four decades. Other polls confirm similar results.

“I’m a capitalist,” he said, “but…” It was the “but” that carried a lot more weight, as he deceptively explained the need to confiscate more wealth from certain people and businesses, along with his insistence on micromanaging various economic decisions like fees for resorts and airline luggage and for prescription drugs.

“We have created a record 12 million new jobs,” he claimed, “more jobs created in two years than any president has ever created in four years.” First of all, presidents don’t create jobs; businesses do. Second, it’s awfully rich for Biden to seize credit for this coincidence of timing. “He inherited an economy that had been unplugged by an artificial, state-induced shutdown,” notes political analyst David Harsanyi. Depending on the count, roughly 30 million jobs were lost thanks to that shutdown — a shutdown not enacted by COVID, as he repeated, but by politicians. “If the government compels businesses to shutter, it doesn’t ‘create’ jobs when allowing them to open.”

In any case, 12.5 million jobs were created (i.e., added back) between May 2020 and January 2021, which is better and faster than Biden’s first two years.

As we predicted, he dishonestly boasted about cutting the deficit and being fiscally responsible in the face of needing to raise the debt ceiling. He blamed “25% of the entire national debt” on his unnamed predecessor. Never mind that the vast majority of the spending was legislated by Democrats during COVID, that the deficit only dropped on Biden’s watch because pandemic spending wound down as planned, or that Biden himself came to Washington when the debt was $450 billion and after decades voting to spend your money it’s now $31.4 trillion.

Crime was another thing Biden blamed on the pandemic. “COVID left other scars, like the spike in violent crime in 2020, the first year of the pandemic,” he lamented as if it was just an unfortunate side effect of people getting sick. The truth is that skyrocketing crime — including a 30% rise in homicides — took place largely in Democrat-run cities plagued by Black Lives Matter riots after the death of George Floyd.

Tellingly, he used that COVID-crime claim to segue into using the parents of Tyre Nichols as political props for his call for police “reform.” Democrats’ hatred for and defunding of cops has fomented much of the crime they now decry.

Similarly, Biden exploited the grief of a father bereft of his daughter thanks to a fentanyl overdose to tout “a major surge to stop fentanyl production, sale, and trafficking.” Many Republicans yelled “Close the border” in response. He had earlier highlighted how “unlawful migration from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela has come down 97%.” That’s because he just declared anyone coming from those countries legal. Biden’s dereliction on the border is well documented.

On foreign policy, the word “balloon” never came out of his mouth, though he did thump his chest a bit, saying: “Make no mistake about it: as we made clear last week, if China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country. And we did.” Wrong — the balloon fiasco was what Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker called “a disastrous projection of weakness.” It wasn’t shot down until a week after it entered U.S. airspace, and even then only after it traversed the entire continent, flying over some of our military facilities in the process.

As for bipartisanship, Biden falsely accused “some Republicans” of wanting “Medicare and Social Security to sunset every five years.” Republicans erupted in objection, booing and yelling, “Liar!” After some extemporaneous banter, Biden claimed to have “converted” the GOP to now agree with him. He was likely referencing a proposal by Senator Rick Scott to sunset federal legislation, but Republicans have loudly and repeatedly explained that his proposal does not include Medicare and Social Security.

He slammed Republicans on guns, abortion, and taxes, among other things. “Unity” only comes when Republicans acquiesce to the Democrats’ agenda.

Arguably his worst lie of the night was to continue railing against Republican “threats” to “democracy.” (It’s a Republic, Joe.) He called January 6 the “greatest threat” to democracy “since the Civil War.” He even blamed January 6 for the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi last November. The deranged leftie attacker was actually “unhinged” by the “Big Lie” of J6, Biden said, “using the very same language” as the “insurrectionists” did. “There is no place for political violence in America,” he lectured. Memo to BLM and antifa.

From there, he launched into a diatribe about how “we must protect the right to vote, not suppress that fundamental right.” Democrats have rigged elections with rules and practices that undermine integrity. No one, meanwhile, has been kept from voting by Republican laws requiring things like voter ID.

Finally, a bit of context for the rosy picture of leadership Biden tried to paint last night. “As I stand here tonight,” he concluded, “I have never been more optimistic about the future of America.” His fellow Americans don’t share that optimism. Biden’s approval rating has not topped 45% since October 2021. Another ABC/Washington Post poll found that 58% of Democrats don’t want Biden to run again.

His bumbling performance last night will do little to improve his standing or to fix the many things ailing the nation. That’s because Democrats have an agenda to push come hell or high water.

<>

Update: Another Biden approval rating indicator: Viewership tanked — down 29% from last year, the second-smallest State of the Union audience on record — other than Biden’s first address to Congress in 2021.