Friday, March 08, 2024

Cryin' and bitchin' from her upscale kitchen, Katie Britt was not a hit

 Katie Britt, psycho mom and rising star in the reich-wing whineosphere, delivered a melodramatic and menacing rebuttal to President Biden's powerful SOTU... and it earned her more jeers than cheers.

Hide the knives, kids, psycho mom is in the kitchen!

As you must surely be aware by now if you follow American politix at all, Alabama republican senator Katie Britt's histrionic, painfully hyper-enunciated, and alternately quavering/menacing State Of The Union rebuttal (aka the "Kitchen Ransom Video") has been ruthlessly mocked all over the media. It even caused shudders and cringes among a significant portion of the MAGAverse, according to, among numerous other sources, Ron Filipkowski, writing on Meidas Touch.com:

Britt's speech...weirdly alternated between bubbly cheerfulness, then concern, then fake anger, then fake outrage, sometimes all within the span of five seconds, leading many to compare her performance to someone auditioning for a high school play for the first time. Naturally, people on the Left were going to criticize her speech. But most surprising was right-wing reaction, where they simply couldn't hide their disappointment.

But to Katie Britt, the critics probably don't matter, since The Mango Monarch of MAGA, His Royal Majesty Donald John Trump, loved the speech.

It has been common practice for years to employ a "rising star" in the opposition party to deliver the counter-SOTU. But this year's choice raised eyebrows for more than one reason.

The rationale for Katie in the kitchen (and Katie at all, for that matter)
Many critics of Katie Britt's SOTU rebuttal focused on the setting of the dramatic diatribe -- her own kitchen -- noting that it was yet another example of not-so-subtle republican/Christofascist messaging that a woman's place is in the kitchen. Critics also noted that Britt is the quintessential young (or relatively young) Stepford Wife or Handmaid's Tale pick to convey the overarching message that Being A Mom and A Wife are by far the most important roles any woman can ever take on, and that Katie's mom-hood status makes her uniquely qualified to expound on how terrifyingly out-of-touch Joe "Bless his heart" Biden allegedly is, and how dangerous he is because his policies are ENDANGERING OUR CHILDREN.

All of those critical speculations are valid. But to me it seems clear that, apart from Kitchen Katie having earned the Mango Mussolini's all-important stamp of approval, the primary (though seriously misguided) intentions for choosing her in particular -- and for choosing her kitchen as the setting for her high-school drama tryout -- include the following:

1. "Kitchen table issues." This one should be pretty obvious. Katie declared right out of the chute that her speech was going to focus on the proverbial "kitchen table issues" -- those matters that are supposedly of utmost concern to ordinary struggling American families, and that they supposedly discuss around their humble kitchen tables during their humble family dinners. Accordingly, some genius(es) decided that the perfect way to convey Britt's supposed empathy with these struggling Americans would be for her to perch at what presumably was a table (it wasn't entirely clear to me) in her clearly upscale (not humble) kitchen. As Jake Johnson, in a March 8, 2024 piece on Common Dreams, put it:

Speaking in hushed tones and intermittently flashing a menacing smile, Britt—the former CEO of an Alabama corporate lobbying organization and the wife of a lobbyist—said from the comfort of her posh kitchen inside her 6,000-square-foot mansion that she understands and sympathizes with "what real families are facing.

Johnson also wrote:

Britt, who has been floated as a possible 2024 running mate for former President Donald Trump, characterized the GOP as the "party of hardworking parents and families"—neglecting to mention the trillions of dollars in tax breaks the party has funneled to the rich and large corporations in recent years while opposing programs such as the expanded child tax credit, which briefly slashed U.S. child poverty in half.

So... major misfire on the whole "kitchen table"/struggling families thing.

2. An appeal to the educated suburban woman/mom demos who currently oppose Trump. Some of Trump's allies caught on to this point right away and defended Britt's disastrous speech.

It would be so much easier for MAGA if we could just go back to the daze when women couldn't vote, but here we are. Although some analysts said that educated (white) suburban women helped deliver the White House to Trump in 2016, those demographics changed their minds during the course of his presidency, and by 2020 had largely turned against him. During the 2020 campaign Trump unsuccessfully begged them for their support, claiming to have "saved their suburbs," but overall they weren't buying it, and ultimately went for Biden.

For the 2024 campaign, Biden's lead over Trump among these demos has narrowed considerably, particularly among white suburban women, but clearly the Trump campaign is still laboring to win their support. And that seems to be a challenge. Consider the state of play in the swing state of Wisconsin, for instance. This is from a December 21, 2023 opinion piece in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Suburban women still hold some conservative views, especially when it comes to finances. They are more likely to agree with Republicans on tax and economic policy. But on all other issues the study explored, Democrats do a better job of matching the values of suburban women, especially on abortion, an issue which is currently consuming the political landscape in Wisconsin and which these women say will be a key deciding factor in 2024 and the state’s 2026 gubernatorial election.

But a major opening exists for kitchen table issues. Suburban women hear very little on Republican-proposed solutions to issues that are particularly relevant to their daily lives, like health care, mental health, and affordable child care, which leads them to trust Democrats more even if they have issues with the liberal approach.  

Yup, there's that mention of "kitchen table issues" again. Given all of these challenges to a total takeover of the hearts, minds, and souls of suburban mommies by Voldemoron, what better Trumpistan ambassador to Normal Momville could there be than a white suburban mommy?

Trouble is, it appears that the mommies aren't buying Kitchen Katie's message.

The idea is that Republicans are desperately trying to sell Republicans as pro-women or pro-mom, [Washington Post columnist Monica] Hesse wrote.

"The trouble," Hesse continued, "is that they are trying to sell it that way once a year, via a televised State of the Union rebuttal, rather than by selling it via policies and legislation. So much of the rest of the night revealed a contrast between what Britt’s party had done for women, and how women and mothers were actually living their lives."

Biden, by contrast, has actually worked to improve the lives of women and their families. So, repubs, good luck with peddling Kitchen Katie as "America's mom."

3. The image of youth/vitality/a new generation of leadership. Ahead of the president's SOTU and Kitchen Katie's rebuttal, Katie was relentlessly promoted (and didn't hesitate to brag about it during her speech) as the youngest woman ever to win a republican Senate seat. This seems to be a subtle but clear message about Joe Biden's advanced age allegedly being a disqualifying factor for the presidency. Never mind the advanced age -- not to mention the clearly abysmal physical condition and mental health -- of the only alternative to Biden in this election: Katie's Cheeto Jeezus Trump.

In the time since I first wrote the above, I've read numerous other comments that are congruent with my initial impressions; in fact Katie herself has since said that the kitchen setting was intended to hammer home that whole "kitchen table" message. But I'm leaving the list above intact even though after so many millions of words have been slung about the matter, it may seem that I am way behind the curve and am simply restating the painfully obvious.

Rising star, or just another red giant?
If the choice of Katie Britt as the "rising star" -- the one most qualified to rebut the SOTU -- was motivated in any way by an attempt to sweeten the horror that the Party Of Trump (aka the American Fascist Party) has become... or to make the republican party appear to be in tune with the needs of ordinary Americans as opposed to the super-rich... or even to foster that "big tent" image for which they've been striving for years (Katie isn't a person of color but she is a woman)... then, sorry, guys, it was a wash on all counts. And as discussed in Item number 2 above, the appeal to that all-important suburban women/mommies crowd was also a flop.

(By the way, in answer to the favored Trump-campaign question this election cycle, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" -- similar to the question that Katie asked as well at the end of her speech -- here's some perspective that contradicts the grim picture being peddled by MAGA.)

There's one point I want to make regarding republicans' largely tone-deaf approach to wooing the commoners: I absolutely do not wish to imply that being affluent or rich, even super-rich, is incompatible with compassion for those much less fortunate, or with a desire for equality and inclusiveness, or with a genuine wish to do good in the world. As I've said on this blog before, in my life I have known several "haves" who actually tried to make things better for the "have-nots" and the marginalized -- one example being right here in the Great State of Texas, the late Marvin Zindler.

But actions do still speak louder than words, even in these days of inordinately loud words, and while Katie and her republican colleagues, hot and heavy on the campaign trail, may talk a good game of genuine concern for the have-nots, their voting records speak much more loudly and clearly than their empty rhetoric.

Red whine goes so well with cheesiness
I will concede that at the moment it appears that Katie is a true rising star in the reich-wing whineopshere, though in this particular speech she labored to make it appear that she was whining on behalf of all Americans (at least the good, patriotic, godly ones) instead of whining about how she has been oppressed and repressed. Don't be fooled by that apparent altruism: remember that she is in lock-step now with the long-time Whiner In Chief, Trump himself, and is poised to become one of his proxies and possibly even his VP pick. And more than likely, at some point during the long campaign months ahead, she will not hesitate to break out a bottle of acidic red whine and raise a toast to her own brave suffering at the hands of the "fake news" and the "liberal media" and the Democrats and the commies and socialists and whatnot.

And speaking of whining, that insufferable quavery voice that dominated Britt's speech has been another topic of widespread speculation and mockery. Some have said it's totally tradwife, deliberately childlike and intended to convey a message of proper womanly submissiveness. That is not beyond the realm of possibility, of course, and it's likely that the delivery did appeal to tradwives and their manly-man husbands, but I have a different take on Katie's motives.

My impression wasn't that she was attempting to communicate submissiveness or weakness at all; rather, the whiny voice was simply part of her over-the-top histrionic attempt to tug on the heartstrings: authentic faux-emotion (fauxmotion?) at its cheesiest. To me her delivery called to mind those endless late-night mini-infomercials (animal rescue, child rescue, etc.) featuring a tremulous, constantly on-the-verge-of-tears female voiceover. I swear, I half-expected to hear Sarah McLachlan's 90s hit "Angel" in the background while Katie Britt quavered on (even though the song itself is probably far too heathen for Katie and her ilk).

It's not just the bad acting and Christofascist messaging; it's also the gaslighting and the hypocrisy
Apart from the delivery and location, there were other serious problems with Katie Britt's kitchen-table theatrics. To begin with, it was framed around a deep fear for the safety and well-being and indeed the future of "our children." This of course is a typical republican rhetorical tactic; they love to use children as political pawns. As many commentators have pointed out, however, if repubs were truly concerned for our children, they wouldn't be voting against legislation to help children and their families, or for legislation that sacrifices the welfare of kids and families to the endless demands of the ultra-wealthy. I mentioned that point myself toward the end of this July 2023 post about a schlocky hit summer movie, a highly fictionalized tale of child sex trafficking called Sound Of Freedom:

...a few folks on Twitter have pointed out the glaring hypocrisy of reich-wingers' sudden deep concern, inspired solely by Sound Of Freedom, about innocent little children -- brown children, at that!-- who are being so ruthlessly trafficked, a concern that seems incongruent with the general indifference of republicans/reich-wingers to the plight of children in general, particularly brown ones. Consider, for example:

I won't deny that Democrats use children and family issues as talking points too. But overall, they're the party that is actually trying to do something to help kids and parents.

Equally as glaring as the hypocrisy about her grave concern for children is Katie Britt's gaslighting and hypocrisy about the whole border/immigration issue. Her kitchen audition was a flagrant demonstration of Border Derangement Syndrome, the hysterical narrative that immigrants are "invading" the US from the Southern border and that they pose a serious existential threat to America.

It should come as no big shocker that several of Britt's statements about President Biden's border policies were exaggerations, misrepresentations, or distortions. In fact her most dramatic tale by far was downright deceitful, as discovered by journalist Jonathan M. Katz when he did a little bit of digging. (And here it may seem that I am burying the lede, given the huge amount of attention that this story has received since I first published this post, but I'll be damned if I'm going to rearrange this entire long screed just to seem more relevant.)

Katie tearfully told a tale about talking with a young woman who, beginning at the age of 12, had been "sex trafficked by the cartels." She'd been repeatedly raped over a period of years, sometimes many times a day. Katie said the woman told her that she had been put on "a mattress in a shoebox of a room, and they sent men through that door, over and over again, for hours and hours on-end." She immediately followed that by saying, "We wouldn't be OK with this happening in a third-world country. This is the United States of America, and it's past time we started acting like it. President Biden's border crisis is a disgrace. It's despicable. And it's almost entirely preventable."

Context is everything, though. And what Psycho Mom neglected to mention was that even though the woman’s story is true, it all took place in Mexico, not the US, and it actually happened 20 years ago, when Biden wasn’t even VP, much less president. (And no, it wasn’t Obama’s fault either. George W Bush was in the White House at that time, not that it was his fault either.)

Accordingly, the entire narrative as presented by Katie was disingenuous at best, though it was most likely swallowed whole by the same crowd who embraced the aforementioned movie Sound Of Freedom as virtually a documentary.

When I initially amended this post to add this twist in the saga, I speculated, facetiously, that it was possible that Katie intended to say that the abduction and years of captivity and repeated rapes took place two decades ago in Mexico, but that her eyes were so filled with fake Tammy-Faye tears at that particular point in her diatribe that she couldn’t read the TelePrompter or the cue cards or whatever. In a more serious vein I wrote that it was even possible that she would claim that she was talking about a totally different sex trafficking/rape vic than the one named in Jonathan Katz's expose (a woman named Karla Jacinto Romero). But there have been developments since my initial speculations.

At the time I first wrote this, it appeared that up to that point Britt had not addressed the matter directly at all, choosing instead to let a spokesperson do the dirty work of dodging the question. And at first, that spokesperson, Sean Ross, refused to directly answer the question about the identity of the rape victim, and insisted that the story was not deceptive, basically because bad stuff is happening at the border and it's Biden's fault. (Here's a direct link to a Xitter post with screenshots of communications between journalist Kyle Whitmire and Katie's spokesdodger Sean Ross.)

Later, however, after Katz's Tik Tok about the issue went viral and other media jumped on it, the Washington Post apparently cornered Ross, and ultimately he admitted that the victim in Katie's story was in fact Karla Jacinto Romero. But he continued to insist, as he had done in initial responses to queries, that the story was not deceptive because bad stuff really is happening at the border, and it's Biden's fault.

After much more coverage about the matter, our stalwart kitchen queen finally spoke up in her own defense. From ABC News, March 10, 2024:

Appearing on "Fox News Sunday," Britt...said she didn't bring up Romero to intentionally blame Biden for what happened to her -- but rather to point to it as an example of the trafficking that is still going on.

"I very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12, so I didn't say a teenager, I didn't say a young woman, a grown woman, a woman -- when she was trafficked when she was 12. And so listening to her story, she is a victim's right advocate who is telling this is what drug cartels are doing, this is how they're profiting off of women," Britt said. "And it is disgusting. And so I am hopeful that it brings some light to -- to it, and we can actually do something about human trafficking and that that's what the media actually decides to cover."

Oh, Katie. You know damn well that this was an attempted slam at Biden. You just got caught. And as for that garbled bit about the vic's age, that hasn't been the matter of controversy. The controversy is your deceptive use of the story itself.

Karla Romero has spoken up as well, and apparently she resents being used as a political pawn, either by United States or Mexican pols. From CNN, March 11, 2024:

[Jacinto] told CNN she was trafficked before Biden’s presidency and said legislators lack empathy when using the issue of human trafficking for political purposes.

“I hardly ever cooperate with politicians, because it seems to me that they only want an image. They only want a photo — and that to me is not fair,” Karla Jacinto told CNN on Sunday...

...Jacinto told CNN that Mexican politicians took advantage of her by using her story for political purposes and that it’s happened again in the United States.

From the perspective of Katie’s political standing, however, it’s probably all moot, since as noted above, her personal savior, Lard Cheeto Jeezus, was quite pleased with her audition.

Apart from Katie's shaky and altogether Trumpian relationship with the truth, there's her hypocrisy regarding the border. She was actually one of the republicans who helped negotiate a bipartisan border security deal -- and then, like most of her rethuglican colleagues, she voted against the bipartisan bill resulting from the negotiations because the Orange Overlord commanded it.

And while we're at it, let's not ignore Katie Britt's hypocrisy regarding women's health issues. From Ariel Messman-Rucker on Pride.com, March 8, 2024:

[Britt] also spent part of her excruciatingly long speech recounting the story of a woman who she claimed was raped at the border because of Biden's "senseless border policies" but failed to see the blatant hypocrisy in her statements considering she is vehemently pro-life and would deny a woman in that position the right to get an abortion.

Exactly. (Do read Ariel Messman-Rucker's entire piece, because it lists some of the most hilarious responses to Britt's performance.)

Finally and most egregiously, Katie Britt's speech was, obviously, a clear endorsement of Donald Trump, even though she never mentioned his name. Apparently the impending death of American democracy, and the rise of fascism within US borders, are of absolutely zero concern to her.

Is "republicunt" too strong a word to use here?

This post has been revised and expanded since initial publication on March 8, 2024.
~ CC

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