08

The most active thread yesterday was titled, "SOTU Thread" and posted in the "Political Discussion" forum. Created to discuss last night's State of the Union address delivered by President Joe Biden, the thread managed to produce 15 pages of discussion in less than 18 hours. With posts being created at that pace and needing to sleep for many of those hours, there was really no way for me to keep up with this thread. Most of my exposure was in response to reports of inappropriate posts. I was interested in how widespread participation in this thread was and, based on a quick analysis it appears that there were nearly fifty posters who contributed to the thread. Of those, five posted more than ten times including three who posted more than twenty times each. Based on what I've read, the thread is a combination of play-by-play discussion of the speech as it takes place, analysis and commentary on various points, discussion of audience behavior, and lots of talk about fashion. The thread also included discussion of Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders' response. DCUM has a liberal-leaning audience so it is no surprise that Biden generally received good marks while Sanders left a lot to be desired. However, conservative posters on DCUM are generally very vocal and frequently dominate threads due to repeated posting. But, it appears that last night even they struggled to find ways to spin things in their favor. Pickings were so slim for them that at one point the best they could do was fixate on Jill Biden kissing Douglas Emhoff as they greeted each other. Sadly for them, even KissGate was fairly short-lived. The highlight of the evening for many was a bit of political rope-a-dope by Biden who accused Republicans of wanting to sunset Social Security and Medicare, only be met by an avalanche of boos and jeers from Republicans. Biden adroitly welcomed the unanimity around protecting those programs declared them off the table. It was an amazing hoisting of Republicans on their own petard.