President Trump & Democratic Leaders Address The Nation

Some thoughts on the prime-time address to the nation from President Trump and the rebuttal from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: 

• Hardly anything new was said by anyone.
• The president didn't look very comfortable giving this kind of speech. Rallies are much more his style, although this allowed him to deliver something more on-message. 
• The side-by-side image of Chuck and Nancy was a really bad call by Democrats. With all the youth and energy we keep hearing about in the Democratic Party, they chose THAT VISUAL?! #facepalm
• The message coming from the president is confusing: There's a massive crisis on the border of epic proportions that requires an address to the nation but it doesn't rise to the level of declaring a national emergency? I mean, I'm not for making that declaration but the approach we saw tonight seems a bit contradictory. 
• Also, if the situation on the border is that bad, how does it benefit us to continue with a government shutdown for an extended period of time when Border Patrol agents are about to miss paychecks, immigration courts are closed and the E-Verify system is down? 
• This idea promoted by Nancy Pelosi that building a wall would be counter to our values is ridiculous. There's nothing wrong or immoral with a barrier to help keep our borders secure. 
• If Mexico is paying for the wall in a roundabout way through the new NAFTA deal, as Trump said yet again, let's see the details of how this is actually going to work. My apologies if I don't just blindly accept that a deal that hasn't even been ratified and contains zero language specifying any kind of financial allocation for a border wall will actually end up turning a campaign rallying cry into a reality. 
• Nothing that was said in either the address by Trump or the rebuttal by Democrats will move the needle or have much of an impact on the government shutdown standoff. However, all was not lost. We're already getting some pretty good memes out of the Chuck and Nancy side-by-side image.