Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/13/bizarre-katie-britt-now-blaming-speaker-mike-johnson-for-her-humiliating-speech-video.html
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I guess Mike told her to make up bullshit & lies about a sex trafficking victim too?
The Party of Personal Responsibility ™, people!
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“Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.”
–Mike 5:11
“Oh, and blessed are the sandwich makers…”
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She never even asked herself “If it’s an honor and a boon to your political bonafides, why aren’t long-time congresspeople fighting over the chance to do it?”
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I watched the SNL skit before I saw her actual speech. They are basically indistinguishable.
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One thing I haven’t seen mentioned much. Shortly after Britt’s speech, CNN ran a montage of her speaking that went back to her college days. She has always spoken in pitch-imperfect, melodramatic Bizarro-speech. The GQP would have known this when they chose her to give the address. Someone somewhere thought she would be a good look for the Party.
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This reaction in real time from the right-wing hosts of “Real America’s Voice” is satisfying:
Five Ten seconds of stunned silence, shocked looks, one guy with his head down like he’s got a migraine, then “uhhh, ummmm. . . I’m sure she’s very nice. . . .”
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How many times can she say, “he’s like” in a conversation? She’s not a teen anymore.
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Confused here. I thought everything was Biden’s fault (if not Obama’s).
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It might be part of the indoctrination that results in the fundy baby voice. She’s been taught to always qualify her opinions, particularly of men. Just like the backtracking about him being kind.
Britt’s rebuttal speech was bizarre and it’s odd no one tried to coach her vocals and intonation better. Did they have no public speaking experts to vet that performance? How could she not know the people who do the rebuttal are criticized?
Now she really needs to step away from the internet. The criticism is really getting to her and the more she protests and complains, the longer she stays in the limelight and the worse she looks.
If her political career wasn’t suffering before she criticized the Johnson, it is now. He doesn’t have a much power as a speaker of the house should, but he does have power. Plus he seems to be favored among the same fundamentalists who probably make up Britt’s entire social circle. And there she is, a woman, criticizing a man. The other fundy men won’t like that
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Stacey Abrams delivered the response to Trump’s State of the Union address in 2019 and subsequently went on to flip Georgia blue for both regular and special elections in 2020 and 2021. She also had two books on the New York Times bestseller list after said address. On the other side of the aisle, Bob Dole delivered the response to Bill Clinton’s first State of the Union address in 1994 and went on to become his party’s nominee for the Presidency in the next election.
So not exactly a career killer if you actually come across as a competent speaker instead of some deranged psychopath.
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So… what you’re saying is that it is a career killer for anyone in the modern GOP?
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Something I’ve noticed about regressives is that they are so immersed in their own rarified worlds with other like-minded folks in a self-selecting, ever narrowing culture that they genuinely don’t understand normie reactions to them when they stick their necks out publicly. Like, these people think that Fox News is too liberal and that because trump can fill a 10,000 seat civic center that is only ever sold out for monster truck rallies that it is a reflection of some overwhelming support for their culture and ideas. They never encounter people who don’t sound like their pastor/spouse/conservative influencer and therefore cannot even comprehend that the vast majority of people think they sound utterly insane and cultish. Ergo… liberal media must be trying to take them down with dishonest, distorted depictions, even though those depictions are exactly what they present to the world.
This should make me empathize with them a little bit, but as heinous as their policies and ideas are publicly, I have firsthand knowledge that they are radically worse within their own spheres.
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She can turn it off and on. There’s a video circulating on InstaTok or whatever it is that shows her in both modes, ‘normal’ and ‘fundie baby voice’. The contrast is pretty jarring.
On the other hand, you have to assume that the speech was rehearsed, so it’s not as if she surprised her handlers by suddenly switching to FBV. They must have signed off on her “PRESIDENT. Biden. Is. So. BAD. He. Makes. Me. WANT. To. CRY” performance.
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Between the more or less eternal “success has many fathers/failure is an orphan” effect and the…noted honesty…of the people we are talking about I’m inclined to be skeptical; but I would be curious about the ‘who knew what details when’ aspect of how a speech like this gets delivered.
Let’s say, for sake of argument, that Britt did get reassurances from Johnson about how it is going to be fine: was that Johnson, knowing the content and delivery of the speech in detail, giving it a thumbs up either because he thinks her stepping on a mine would be useful or amusing or (not entirely unlikely given his ideological stance) he actually thought that a fundie tradwife talking about the carnage of Biden’s America was so compelling he felt the vague need to confess to his accountability partner about how it made him feel? Was that just Johnson, unaware of the details of the plan, (not incorrectly) noting that state of the union rebuttals can and have gone just fine; assuming that this one would also be a reasonably competent and mediagenic recitation of the sins of sleepy Joe?
I just don’t really have a sense, and am not having much luck building one now that it was a debacle and thus everyone says it wasn’t there idea, of how much prior arrangement(whether collaboration or command-and-control with the minion being handed a script; or both) goes into something like this. Is it the sort of thing where the content would be closely vetted by multiple people within party leadership(in which case it appears that there was either a gross miscalculation or a deliberate attempt to go full weird); or is it the sort of thing where just saying some unpleasant stuff about the incumbent’s record is considered a reasonably lightweight task that you can safely delegate to someone with a nontrivial amount of prior political experience; no need to micromanage them, and this is what they came up with?
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Putting her in the kitchen but letting her make a statement was bound to send a mixed message to the fundies. No wonder they are confused and irritated.
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Also, within her world, does she have people who are honest, and who can tell her hard truths? And is she capable of hearing it?
On the other hand, she somehow got to be a Senator(!), by talking Republican talking points (which are often nonsensical) in FBV. That approach, bizarrely, worked, up to this point. I wouldn’t have thought a corrupt nepo baby famous for ostentatiously losing money in the NY real estate and NJ casino market would be able to sell himself as a self made business genius, but here we are.
MTG, Boebert and Nancy Mace are, to an extent, models of success. So, when the circus is in town, and rubes are buying, it makes some sense to act the clown.
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F’ing magnets words, how do they work?
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Something I’ve noticed about regressives is that they are so immersed in their own rarified worlds with other like-minded folks in a self-selecting, ever narrowing culture that they genuinely don’t understand normie reactions to them when they stick their necks out publicly.
Exactly. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Mike Johnson not only knew what her speech would be beforehand but also was at a dress rehearsal and didn’t see anything wrong with it because he’s deep in the same culture she is.
These folks are all sure that they’re the Real Americans - the Silent Majority - and that most of the rest of the country will hear what they say and agree with them. They’re usually wrong but they’re so sure that they’re the real majority that they never seem to be able to learn that lesson.
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Tradwife aesthetic in whisper-tones set in a kitchen (where she should be)? He was probably wetting himself fantasizing thinking about Jesus touching himself to it.
/s on the brackets, btw. Just in case.
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