That vast collective awwwww you heard shortly after 9 o'clock Eastern last night? This explains it.
Actual headline from The Huffington Post after President Obama's State of the Union speech -- "This is the Best Hug in the History of Liberal America."
My apologies if you ate just before reading that or were drinking a hot beverage. A trigger warning was in order.
Here's how it was conveyed by HuffPo scribe Amanda Gutterman in a post one hopes she was assigned to write and didn't suggest on her own --
President Barack Obama enjoyed a warm embrace with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Tuesday, as the commander in chief made his way into the House of Representatives to deliver the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress.
"She is one of my favorite people," Obama told The New Yorker in 2014, after the 81-year-old associate justice was rushed to the hospital with a blocked artery. Following her hospitalization, Ginsburg brushed aside suggestions that she step down from the bench while Obama is still in office. The president told the magazine at the time: "Life tenure means she gets to decide, not anybody else, when she chooses to go."
It's clear that the warm feelings are mutual between Ginsburg and Obama, who had a special bond even before he was elected president.
"When the Court had one of its occasional dinners for members of the Senate, Ginsburg asked that Obama be seated at her table," wrote Supreme Court expert Jeffrey Toobin.
That's it? Obama and Ginsburg are ideological soulmates who enjoy each other's company, along with killer games of ping-pong (OK, I made that part up), and he kissed her ring during that brief interval between getting elected to his sole term in the Senate and running for president. They share a "warm embrace" shortly before the Kabuki theater that is the State of the Union pep rally -- and this qualifies as the "best hug in the history of liberal America"? As determined by ... what? It defies comprehension that there are actually people out there, even those working at Puffington Host, who see the world in this way.
Then again, so does our ever so solemn Secretary of State, John Kerry. Hours before introducing pop singer James Taylor to sing "You've Got a Friend" for the French, Kerry said how he dearly wished he could "share a big hug with Paris." Turns out that French President Francois Hollande wanted un petit calin with Kerry.
Here's where HuffPo let me down, yet again -- one of their favorite journalistic tropes is the ubiquitous slideshow of photos with cutlines in lieu of actual journalism. If Obama and Ginsburg savoring a clutch for the ages qualifies as best hug ever for American libs, who else is on the list? Alas, the one time I actually wanted a slideshow from HuffPo and they didn't do it.
A hug that definitely wouldn't make the compilation -- Bill Clinton's hearty embrace of a beret-clad Monica Lewinsky at a White House rope line. I'd have to dust off my dog-eared copy of the Starr Report to determine if this took place before or during their torrid affair (probably safe to assume it wasn't after).
In fairness to Obama and Bader Ginsburg, at least their mutual physical affection is unlikely to qualify for inclusion in a future BuzzFeed story on "political hugs ranked from awkward to most awkward."
Speaking of Bader Ginsburg, consider yourself warned -- "she could break you!" declared MSNBC's Rachel Maddow a tad too enthusiastically.
