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
