President Biden delivered the annual State of the Union address before congress on Thursday, March 7th of 2024. As is the hallowed tradition, immediately afterwards the Republican party rebuttal was given and fulfilling that role this year was the junior senator from Alabama Katie Britt. Speaking from the lavish kitchen of her luxury home located in Montgomery, Katie struck a decidedly melodramatic tone as she performed a maudlin monologue aimed at pushing back on the President's message.
Alternating between breathy whispers and snide chortles, Katie embodied a thespian's portrayal caught somewhere between a basic Minnesota hockey mom and a desperate housewife lost amongst the milieu of Connecticut's blue blood country club Stepford Wives. Matching her histrionic high theatrics, Katie employed a number of startling non sequiturs featuring colorful language that may have left many yearning for the authentically populist stylings of Mo Brooks who in an alternate universe might have been Alabama's senator instead. Building upon the sophomoric drama club antics, Katie delivered her own assessment of the union's state by remarking;
"Right now, the American dream has turned into a nightmare for so many families. The true, unvarnished state of our union begins and ends with this; our families are hurting, our country can do better."
Contrasting President Biden's executive failure to secure the border, Katie emphasized her own public safety credentials by commenting;
"When I took office, I took a different approach. I travelled to the Del Rio sector of Texas. That is where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of twelve. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped. The cartels put her 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."
Hopefully there were not too many young children in the living rooms of America to overhear that gratuitously graphic instance of TMI. Evoking a slightly folksier form of southern charm, Katie critiqued Biden's economic policies by noting;
"The American people are scraping by while President Biden proudly proclaims that Bidenomics is working. Goodness, y'all, bless his heart. We know better."
Looking to flex her national security chops, Katie attempted to demonstrate a grasp of geopolitical matters by stating;
"China is buying up our farmland, spying on our military installations and spreading propaganda through the likes of TikTok. See, the CCP know that if it conquers our next generation, it conquers America. What does President Biden do? He bans TikTok for government employees but creates an account for his own campaign. Y'all, you can't make this stuff up."
Millennial instagram moms across the nation seemed to be the intended target of this overproduced message, seeking to capitalize on TikTok hysteria while turning a blind eye to the Big Tech enemy from within. Segueing into another shallow attempt at garnering support from swing state suburban soccer moms, Katie countersignaled Alabama's recent Supreme Court decision by declaring her own ardent support for IVF by boasting;
"We want families to grow. It is why we strongly support continued nationwide access to in vitro fertilization."
Further attempting to connect with disaffected thirtysomethings, Katie remarked;
"I know, you are probably disgusted by most of what you see going on in Washington and I will be really honest with you. You are not wrong for feeling that way. Look, I get it. The task in front of us isn't an easy one, but I can promise you one thing. It is worth it. So I am asking you for the sake of your kids and your grandkids, get into the arena."
Whatever high hopes were tied to Katie's mass media gambit, ubiquitous mockery abounded in the wake of her awkwardly staged performance which smacked conspicuously of Hollywood acting lessons and too much time spent on trips to New York Broadway shows. Biden's forgettable speech became immediately overshadowed by a feeding frenzy of headlines proclaiming universal stupefaction at what the nation had just witnessed on their television screens. Saturday Night Live predictably took advantage of the smarmy situation only two nights later, enlisting actress Scarlett Johansson to recreate Katie's dubious delivery.
Acting in the role of Katie's overdone doppelganger, Johansson introduced herself by saying;
"Good evening America, my name is Katie Britt and I have the honor of (chortle) serving the great people of Alabama. But tonight, I will be auditioning for the part of 'scary mom'. I will be performing an original monologue called 'This Country is Hell'. You see, I am not just a senator. I am a wife, a mother and the craziest bitch in the Target parking lot."
Evoking Katie's own bout with excessive oversharing, Johansson exclaimed;
"My husband Wesley and I just watched President Biden's speech and what I saw was the performance of a permanent politician. But me, I am not performing. I'm not, I'm not (voice cracks dramatically). First and foremost, I am a mom and like any mom I am going to do a pivot out of nowhere into a shockingly violent story about sex trafficking."
Recreating Katie's razor sharp tonal shifts and stunning lack of context, Johansson declared;
"Now, I am going to get weirdly seductive for no apparent reason. As I was saying, the American dream has turned into a nightmare. You know, my husband Wesley and I spend a lot of time in this kitchen worrying. Kitchens are where families have the hard conversations, like the one we will have tomorrow about how mommy freaked out the entire country."
All things considered, Katie's rebuttal consisted materially of boilerplate Fox News talking points with a bit of dramatic flair baked in which ultimately renders the media's tempest in a teapot overreaction to her performative display a veritable nothingburger. What gets lost in translation amongst all this coastal pearl clutching is the real heart of the matter, Katie's mentor and predecessor, the former Senator from Alabama Richard Shelby whom she replaced. Casting an even larger big government shadow than Katie's time previously misspent as president and CEO of the Business Council of Alabama, Shelby's pork barrel dealings during his long tenure in the senate have been further illuminated in recent reporting.
According to a March 9th New York Times article entitled "Republicans' Big FBI cut Came From Scrapping One Senator's Earmark", Shelby's fingerprints were all over the 6% in overspending by the agency that had been cut out in a bill passed by the House on March 8th. Referencing Shelby's budget busting chicanery, the article wrote;
But the story of the FBI cut is not so much one of how House Republicans used their slim majority to raze the budget of an agency they claim has gone rogue. Instead, it is a remarkable yarn about how a single powerful senator used budgetary sleight of hand to steer hundreds of millions of dollars to a single project in his state, only to see the money slashed by members of his own party after he retired.
Out of the $654 million lawmakers agreed to cut this year from the FBI’s operating budget, $622 million came from eliminating what was essentially an old earmark: money for construction at the bureau’s campus at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. The funding was placed into the budget years ago by Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, a legendary pork-barreling veteran who retired in 2022 at 88.
Providing further context on Shelby's fiduciary mischief, the article continues;
Ultraconservative Republicans like Rep. Chip Roy of Texas who voted against the spending package this week, deriding it as full of budgetary gimmicks, pointed to the elimination of Shelby’s pet project as a prime example of how little his party had actually been able to cut.
Grousing about the FBI budget cut on the House floor this week, Roy said, “What they won’t tell you is, 95% of that cut is eliminating an earmark from Richard Shelby, because Richard Shelby is no longer here to defend his pet project building back in Alabama.”
For years, Shelby used his perch on the Appropriations Committee to single-handedly transform the landscape of his home state, harnessing billions of federal dollars to conjure the creation and expansion of university buildings and research programs, airports and seaports, and military and space facilities.
One of his most prioritized projects was the twin FBI campuses at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, where over the course of a decade, he steered more than $3 billion to build up the 1,100 acres of land the bureau has secured there for facilities dedicated to cyberthreat intelligence and training.
“Growing the FBI’s presence in Huntsville has been a priority of mine for quite some time,” Shelby said in an announcement in 2022 touting the additional funding. “And I am proud to have helped bring it to fruition.”
Now that the student has become the master, we can put Katie's prime time debut into perspective and concern ourselves with her more impactful actions as a senator. Hopefully, Katie forgets most of what she learned from Shelby and finds a way to represent her constituents more earnestly. Despite Katie looking like Beverly Hills, sounding like Martha's Vineyard and cashing in like downtown Birmingham, the voters who put her in office are living a more spartan existence which she would be wise to become reacquainted with if only for the sake of her own self interest in getting reelected.
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