There was once a time when we might have live-blogged the Republican responses to a State of the Union address, but we're all much older and more tired now and the collective "news" broken during all State of the Union responses combined, in the past decade, consists of that time Marco Rubio needed to take a drink of water and pretty much nothing else.

The Republican response this time around was apparently given by Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, who perhaps needed a bit of good publicity after she was discovered to have taken nearly a half million dollars of federal pandemic relief money to pay staffers in her own state government office, which isn't what the pandemic fund was intended for. Reynolds also allegedly took steps to hide where the cash was going, and has also refused to provide the documentation required for auditing the expenditure, so she's clearly been doing her be more like Donald Trump homework.

Anyhoo, Reynolds continued the long tradition of State of the Union responses that completely ignore the actual speech they're responding to in order to fire off a laundry list of pre-determined attack lines, so we're going to respect that choice by reviewing Kim Reynolds' speech without bothering to actually watch or read it. I thought the part where she promised to kill, stuff, and mount Hank, the bear breaking into South Lake Tahoe homes for winter snacks, to be unnecessarily gruesome. I don't like the part where she swore that Republicans were on Ukraine's side and against Russia, but she kept mispronouncing "Ukraine" as "eclair" so it sounded like she was defending Republican dessert rights. The part where she juggled Hummel figurines while reciting Donald Trump's favorite poem, The Snake, showed remarkable dexterity but I thought muddled her central anti-Hank messages.

There you go, you're caught up.

From actual not-entirely-imaginary news coverage, it appears the parts of Reynolds' speech we missed focused primarily on convincing America that the pandemic, the economic chaos of the pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and a new wave of our children learning uncomfortable things are all Joe Biden's fault. According to The New York Times, she was selected for the bit by Sen. Mitch McConnell "in part" because of Reynolds' anti-masking stances. Reynolds is one of the Republican governors who has signed on to efforts to ban school mask mandates, because Republican parents don't like masks and it's extremely important to Republican parents that these preferences be played out in classroom proxy battles that may or may not kill teachers or neighbors or other parents or the kids themselves outright.

Do not let anyone, anywhere tell you that Americans "love their children." Some do and some don't. For many parents, that "love" is purely conditional and predicated on their children hating the right things or hurting the right people, which is why books that portray LGBT adolescents as normal and worthy of normal lives are among the top targets on all the newest banned book lists.

The other bit of Reynolds' speech consisted of a half-hearted attempt to erase all of recent Republican history to claim that Republicans are indeed in Ukraine's corner and against Vladimir Putin's bloody war, despite the Republican Party specifically stripping support for Ukraine from the last platform it ever bothered to write, per the demands of the Trump campaign; despite Republican airwaves and conferences being awash with praise for the "smart" Putin and his "smart" white nationalist, non-woke murders and violence; and despite Gov. Kim Reynolds herself being a strong backer of Donald Trump's extortion of Ukraine during Trump's first impeachment trial. According to the Kim Reynolds of back then, holding Trump to account for blocking military aid to the at-war Ukraine so that he and Rudy Giuliani could pressure Ukraine's democratic government into announcing a thoroughly fake investigation of the Biden family was outrageous.

Now she's just another one of the insufferably ambitious Republican governors insisting that the party's previous explicit support for sabotaging the Ukrainian government using propaganda backed by pro-Putin oligarchs is nothing the rest of us should be going on about. Republicans didn't back Trump's every effort to hand Putin whatever Putin expressed even mild interest in. Republicans didn't actually nod and applaud during the countless episodes in which Trump or one of his hackish underlings attacked the very premises of NATO or flung cheap, spurious insults towards the nations that comprise it. Heavens no, and to prove it Kim will add three more Hummel figurines to her performance.

I think we've given Reynolds' response about the right amount of attention now, so we're good. The short version is that once again, Republican leaders chose as their best spokesperson an anti-mask, pandemic-prolonging, culture-war-focused hack currently under investigation for stealing government funds and who turned in a performance that had not a damn thing to do with anything, but instead was filled with the same six or seven talking points Republicans have currently chosen to flood the airwaves with while completely ignoring all the misery their incompetence bestowed on the rest of us.

Who else were they going to pick? The still-indicted Texas attorney general? The Florida governor just caught on camera yelling at students for wearing masks in his presence? Tucker?