Never pass up a chance to sit down or relieve yourself. -old Apache saying

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Katie Britt

I watched most of Katie Britt's "response" to Joe Biden's State of The Union address last week. Had to keep muting it because she was so overly melodramatic and spooky. This is the best that the GOP could come up with? Wow, the GOP is truly in trouble, and deservedly so.


The pure emptiness of Katie Britt

The Republican way of life has emptied her of anything even marginally recognizable as real

By LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV

Salon Columnist
March 12, 2024

If there’s one thing the last 72 hours have taught us, it’s how hard it is to be a woman and a Republican these days.  Take the woman who has dominated the news over the weekend, Alabama Senator Katie Britt. She appeared on national TV to give the Republican rebuttal to Joe Biden’s State of the Union Thursday and for her efforts was famously lampooned by Scarlett Johansen on Saturday Night Live.

The phrase “deer caught in the headlights” seemed to have been invented to describe Britt as she posed in front of what appeared to be a greenscreen image of her own kitchen. She went from weepy to ecstatic to inordinately sincere and back again, zig-zagging her way through a script some committee of Trump campaign staffers had lashed together for her to act her way through. The disconnect between the words she read off the teleprompter and her voice and expression was, uh…how can I put this? Jarring isn’t quite right. Annoying? Well, yes, there’s that. 

What’s that feeling I’m reaching for, hovering just out of reach of my consciousness? Okay, I’ve got it. Watching Britt’s face and listening to her whisper her way through the introduction of her remarks, I felt embarrassed for her. Really, I did. She had no sense at all of what she was saying, or how to say it, because she was just reading words, not expressing them, or feeling what she said.  She whispered, “our country is less secure,” and then smiled widely into the eye of the camera.  That is simply not the way you say those words, and having said them, how you react to what you’ve said.  It doesn’t even rise to the level of fake.  It’s just…nothing, a pure emptiness knowable only to, yes, Katie Britt.

I’m going to do something I probably shouldn’t attempt. I’m going to try to figure out why she read the phrase the way she did and then punctuated it with her wide, entirely inappropriate and obviously insincere smile.

Katie Britt is a product of the University of Alabama “Machine,” the informal but hugely powerful group of fraternity and sorority members who run the Student Government Association by proxy, electing presidents of the association each year, and through them influencing and in many cases running student life on the university campus.  Being a part of the “Machine” at the University of Alabama is the way you get ahead in the state’s business and politics, which in that tightly-knit southern state are one and the same.

The way you get ahead in the “Machine” is to play along in the university’s “Greek” system, which in the case of fraternities, prizes good old boyism like partying, drinking, adolescent misbehavior and copying what your father did when he was in the same fraternity you’re in, because he got you in.  With sororities, it’s a female version of the frat stuff, bottom-lined by whatever passes for this year’s version of antebellum submissiveness. Britt was president of the Student Government Association (SGA) during the 2003-2004 school year, which on the SGA website appears with an unexplained asterisk next to it.

In Alabama, the “Machine” is thought to have legendary powers: they elect the student body president, the Homecoming Queen, members of the student senate and other student presidents on campus, and many of those same campus officers go on to bigger and more powerful positions in state and federal government, like, for example, Katie Britt. The “Machine” is often compared to Yale’s Skull and Bones, one of those college frat things that nobody will admit to being a member of, but everybody knows how powerful it is, and how powerful you are if you’re associated with it. The power of the “Machine” at the University of Alabama has held since the 1920s, with the sole exception of 1992 through 1996 when the SGA was banned by the university. 

It's a much longer story, but the banning in 1992 involved the harassment and assault of a non-machine candidate for president of the SGA, who was – you guessed it – a woman.  According to “Crimson White,” the student newspaper, a cross was burned on her lawn, and she was assaulted, causing “a golf ball-size bruise on her cheek, a busted lip, and a knife wound on the side of her face.” I couldn’t find any records of arrests for the assault, or what happened after the woman “fled the campus.”

On its website, the University of Alabama Student Government Association says its goal is to “strive to continue promoting a culture that instills servant leadership in its members so that its constituents may serve societal needs on a larger scale beyond the institution.”

Got that not-so-subtle phrase – “servant leadership” – dripping with Christian theological undertones? Those words also describe the look on Katie Britt’s face and her tone of voice last week as she dutifully read the script written for her by the Trump campaign, masquerading as the Republican National Committee, now co-chaired by one of Trump’s personal servant leaders, his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. 

There is another word to describe Britt’s manner as she spoke for Republicans last week: smarmy. Speaking from what appears to be her kitchen, Britt described the room as “where we laugh together, and it’s where we hold each other’s hands and pray for God’s guidance.” She then studiously looked away from the camera’s gaze, looked back into the camera’s eye and intoned in a mock whisper: “And it’s where many nights, to be honest, it’s where Wesley and I worry.  I know we’re not alone.  And so tonight, the American family needs to have a tough conversation.”

It's hard to capture just how blatantly studied and overacted and false Britt’s entire spiel was. But the thing that kept coming across to me was how learned her delivery was.  She was good at it in a way that bad actors are – they deliver lines with what they’ve been taught is just the right emphasis on certain words, with just the right turn of the head, flutter of eyelids, pursing of lips, and in the case of Britt, smile after smile so posed and automatic, any emphasis a real smile would have afforded to an alleged thought or fact in an individual line is lost in a glare of teeth and lips. Following her whispered secrets of what she and her husband Wesley say at their kitchen table, Britt settles into a mock-confidence you can only attain if pretty much everything in your life has been given to you by connections and powerful friends and whispered confidences that began in college dorms or sorority bedrooms: “Because the truth is, we’re all worried about the future of our nation.” Delivered by a woman who probably has yet to feel an actual worry beyond having forgotten to pick up diapers from the store or empty the cat box, the line had all the force of a snowflake landing on a gloved hand.

The reaction to Britt’s so-called rebuttal has been brutal. I compared her mockingly to an alien from another planet. Writer Jonathan M. Katz dug into her speech to find the made-up story about meeting an immigrant who she indicated had been trafficked and raped under President Biden’s watch when it turned out that it had happened during the presidency of George W. Bush — in Mexico

But experiencing the speech again, I think we’re missing the point. Watching her face with even just a smidgen of empathy, you can’t help wondering what it must be like to be Katie Britt, to have been given what has to be seen as evident ambition and talent and squashed it in service not just to Donald Trump – that’s bad enough – but to an idea and a way of life that has so emptied her of anything even marginally recognizable as real. 

At least an actor in a role on the stage or in a film knows they are delivering lines, picking up a paycheck and moving on to the next role. Katie Britt is playing a self she gave up rights to long ago. The “Machine” ran her at the University of Alabama. Now the Republican Party runs her. Imagine how that must feel. She’s not a shell, or in words we would apply to a man of her ilk, an empty suit. She is a Republican ideal of womanhood. She did what they told her to do. She said the words they gave her to say. She accomplished everything they set out for her to accomplish. The question is, can reality – any reality – penetrate the pretense of life she and the Republican Party are presenting to the American public?

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better. You can read his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Original.


Friday, March 8, 2024

Paul Krugman

For many years, Paul Krugman has been a steady voice of reason for left-leaning economic policy at the New York Times. This time, Paul reminds us of the horrid last year of Traitor Trump's "presidency." How quickly we forget. I think I have determined that many, if not most, of Trump supporters are not necessarily uneducated about or unaware of Trump's badness. No, they LIKE IT. They are racist bully users like Trump, so they just fucking love the guy, and no amount of education is going to change that. As Hillary Clinton suggested, "a basket of deplorable." 

So this reminder is for those that may have forgotten about how bad Trump was, and for those newer, younger voters who may not have been paying too much attention at the time. Plus, it's just a good idea to try to remember as much as possible about our short time on this planet.

Reminder: Trump's Last Year in Office Was a National Nightmare

Paul Krugman
New York Times Opinion
March 7, 2024

One of the amazing political achievements of Republicans in this election cycle has been their ability, at least so far, to send Donald Trump’s last year in office down the memory hole. Voters are supposed to remember the good economy of January 2020, with its combination of low unemployment and low inflation, while forgetting about the plague year that followed.

Since Trump’s romp in the Super Tuesday primaries, however, the ex-president and his surrogates have begun trying to pull off an even more impressive act of revisionism: portraying his entire presidency — even 2020, that awful first pandemic year — as pure magnificence. On Wednesday, Representative Elise Stefanik, the chair of the House Republican Conference, tried echoing Ronald Reagan: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

And Trump himself, in his Tuesday night victory speech, reflected wistfully on his time in office as one in which “our country was coming together.”

So let’s set the record straight: 2020 — the fourth quarter, if you will, of Trump’s presidency — was a nightmare. And part of what made it a nightmare was the fact that America was led by a man who responded to a deadly crisis with denial, magical thinking and, above all, total selfishness — focused at every stage not on the needs of the nation but on what he thought would make him look good.


Before I get there, a quick note to Stefanik: When Reagan delivered his famous line, America was suffering from a nasty combination of high unemployment and high inflation. March 2024 looks very different. While we, like other major economies, experienced a bout of inflation during the postpandemic recovery, most workers have experienced wage gains considerably larger than the price increase. 

And President Biden is currently presiding over a remarkable episode of “immaculate disinflation”: rapidly falling inflation with unemployment near a 50-year low.

But while even a focus on early 2020 doesn’t tell the story Republicans think it does, what we really should be discussing is what happened to America when the coronavirus arrived.

Once we knew that a deadly virus was on the loose — and we now know that several officials warned Trump about the threat in January 2020 — the appropriate policy response was clear: do whatever we could to slow the rate at which the virus was spreading.

Even though large numbers of Americans would inevitably suffer from Covid-19 at some point, “flattening the curve” had two huge advantages. First, it would help avoid the very real possibility that a tsunami of Covid infections would overwhelm our health care system. Second, it bought time for the development of effective vaccines: Since vaccines could greatly reduce mortality from Covid-19, deaths delayed by public health measures would, in many cases, be deaths avoided.

What kind of public action was needed? In the early stages of the pandemic, as scientists raced to figure out exactly how the virus spread, blunt measures were required: engaging in social distancing, blocking high-risk interactions as much as possible. 

These measures were costly: In April 2020, unemployment shot up to 14.8 percent. But America is a rich country that could and for the most part did mitigate the economic pain with financial aid to hard-hit workers and businesses. And once researchers and medical officials keyed in on the virus’s airborne character, it became possible to limit its spread by getting people to wear masks, which was annoying but by no means a severe hardship.

And the logic of flattening the curve said that speed was of the essence. Every day spent dithering about whether to take strong action to protect public health meant more Americans dying unnecessarily.

Unfortunately, at the time, the man in charge denied, dithered and delayed at nearly every step of the way.

It’s well worth reading a timeline of Trump’s statements amid the growing pandemic, which some estimates suggest had already caused around half a million excess deaths by the time he left office.

On Jan. 22, Trump said: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China.”

On Feb. 27, he said: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”

On April 3, he said: “With the masks, it’s going to be really a voluntary thing. You can do it. You don’t have to do it. I’m choosing not to do it.” At that point, the main purpose of masks was not to protect the wearer but to protect those around him; why should exposing others to the risk of deadly disease be a voluntary choice? And why wouldn’t the president lead by example, by masking up?


On May 21, he answered that question, admitting he had worn a mask while visiting a Ford plant, but took it off when he went outside because “I didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it.”

And there’s much, much more. There’s no real question that thousands of Americans died unnecessarily because of Trump’s dereliction of duty in the face of Covid-19.

He responded to the only major crisis of his presidency with self-serving fantasies — with utter indifference to other Americans’ lives in an effort to boost his image.

Are we really supposed to feel nostalgic about 2020?


Original.


He's always watching

He's always watching