Suppose a president of the United States delivered a State of the Union address and nobody cared? Isn’t that what happened Tuesday night when the increasingly irrelevant — and, yes, boring Barack Obama — droned on about predictable things in a predictable way? We have been forced to listen to him so many times (often several times in a single day) that it could qualify as cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Constitution.

One of the problems with political speech is that it exists in its own world and creates its own standards. Politicians measure their policies according to their own “facts,” ignoring outcomes that don’t fit their beliefs.