Given that right-wing MAGA politics is now nothing more than reality television (in other words, scripted and fake), it is now acceptable and expected that a Republican will heckle a Democratic president during a State of the Union address. Most of us will never forget “You Lie!” shouted out while President Obama spoke. How he kept his composure is beyond our comprehension.

So it’s now to be expected. But it took extra MAGA sauce to heckle the United States president while he discussed his deceased son Beau Biden. Of course, whenever we talk extreme MAGA (which is unbelievably extreme), we’re most often talking about Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who did heckle Biden when he spoke about his dead son. Biden linked Beau’s brain cancer to exposure to military burn pits.

Asked about it this morning on MSNBC’s “Way Too Early,” which is on way too early, Jen Psaki was not late in delivering the perfect response. Lemire asked:

“Jen, one of the headlines that emerged from the speech last night was a pair of Republican House members who chose to heckle President Biden as he was speaking about his late son Beau. Do you have any response to what they said?”

Psaki did exactly what a professional should do, deny the hecklers the attention and outrage that they so dearly wanted and turn the question back around to what the administration wanted to talk about.

During that heckling and I was watching on TV with a group of my team members and colleagues, and we were all excited and cheering, and that was the moment in the speech where the president was talking about his unity agenda and talking about priorities that we should all be able to agree on. 

Look, one American dies every five minutes of an opioid overdose. There is no question we should do more to help our nation’s veterans, people who have been hurt by the impacts of burn pits. Of course, we need to do more to work together to cure cancer. They were heckling around that time and that moment.

But, of course, the heckling was so bizarre (During the mention of his dead son? There wasn’t a more controversial or heated part they could use?), that Jen couldn’t help but bring out her hammer and make the two of them look even smaller. And here it comes:

I think that says a lot more about them than it does about how important these priorities are and how much the vast majority of people who were sitting there watching in that chamber last night could work together to solve exactly those problems. And others, too, probably.

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[email protected] with Nicole Hickman