Don’t feel ashamed if President Obama’s State of the Union address seemed bewildering. Perhaps you felt like factually false assertions kept coming out of the president’s mouth — not debatable or tendentious statements, but stuff that just plain isn’t true, and that could have easily been fact-checked by his speech writers. That’s because such assertions did keep coming — again and again.

This might explain quite a bit. Obama, it appears, begins his discussion of public affairs from a completely different set of premises than those who read the news and keep up on the world.