President Obama took aim at his adversaries. Pew pew, he is reported to have said.
President Obama took aim at his adversaries. "Pew pew," he is reported to have said. Frederic Legrand - COMEO / Shutterstock.com
As countries go, we're doing okay. We're not perfect; we're not the best (as evidenced by our routine failure to embrace global treasure Mary Berry), but all things considered America isn't terrible.

Obama's State of the Union last night was encouraging and peppy, and gave us some reasons to feel relatively good about having Democrats in the White House. And what's more, most of his claims were actually true! You can't say that about most of the high-profile rhetoric we've been hearing lately.

So the next time you hear Trump or Cruz or Fiorina (haha, j/k about that last one) hollering about America's problems, take a deep breath, glance over the handy factoids embedded in the State of the Union, and remember things aren't that bad.

So how good are things in America right now? Well, unemployment is at a seven-year low (although of course that figure is wobbly, since it doesn't include people who've given up looking for work). The deficit is about 25 percent of what it was in 2009. High school graduation is at 82 percent, compared to 75 percent in 2008, which means fewer teenagers out bothering people when they should be in day care. And of course, 18 million people have gained proper health insurance (and in many cases are saddled with big monthly premiums, but hey at least they're covered if disaster strikes).

We've also implemented big steps to cut pollution, which may not be enough to save our species from climate catastrophe, but at least the apocalypse won't be as bad or as soon as it could have been.

We've brought home 160,000 soldiers; we've restored diplomatic relations with Cuba; there's a deal with Iran in place to cut off access to nuclear weapons; and, oh yeah, queers can get married now. I made a little queer-state-of-the-union to address some of the LGBT progress we've made:

But not everything Obama had to say was totally accurate. He opened the speech by promising it would be short, but it was only a minute shorter than the one in 2013. THANKS OBAMA.

Also, he claimed that we've done a better job of cutting emissions than any other country on Earth, which is true-ish but only because we were producing way too much, which sets a pretty low bar. And his jobs accounting is a little fiddly: He says he created almost a million manufacturing jobs, which is only true if you look at one slice of his presidency. (On the whole, the country's lost a quarter million manufacturing jobs.)

But generally speaking, things are going pretty well, which is probably why a scientific analysis of the speech by Wired shows that it ended on the most optimistic note of any SOTU to date.

The Republicans responded with a lot of blah-blah-blah from miserable surrogates, including a rebuttal by South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who could barely un-grit her teeth enough to speak. Hang in there, Nikki. It's going to be a rough next few months for all of us.