Just as it engaged in its annual ritual of attacking anyone who refused to hate President Biden’s State of the Union address as much as it did, the Media Research Center also engaged in its annual ritual of defending the Republican response to it no matter how weird it got — and Rep. Katie Britt’s “fundie baby voice,” filled with softness and submission, made it plenty weird. First up, though, was Luis Cornelio with a March 8 post praising Britt for spouting right-wing narratives:
Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) did not give President Joe Biden a pass on his hypocritical TikTok stance in her Thursday rebuttal to the contentious State of the Union address.
Britt’s message was blunt and clear: Biden can’t have his cake and eat it too.
“The CCP knows that if it conquers the minds of our next generation, it conquers America,” she said, addressing Americans from her Alabama home. “And what does President Biden do? He bans TikTok for government employees, but creates an account for his own campaign.”
That praise out of the way, it was time for the MRC to switch to defense mode as Britt’s weirdness was commented upon. It was part of Nicholas Fondacaro’s daily hate-watch of “The View”:
The hypocrisy displayed by the cast of ABC’s The View is never more apparent when their “support all women” shtick clashes with their disdain for actual conservative women. That scenario played out again on Friday as they viciously attacked the mental health Alabama Senator Katie Britt (R) for her less-than-stellar and unusual rebuttal to President Biden’s State of the Union address the previous evening; suggesting that she needed to be pumped full of “medication” and thrown in a “padded room” away from “knives.”
“Get some medication, Katie!” moderator Joy Behar screeched. “I’ve never seen mood swings like this. One minute she’s like [pretends to cry], then she’s like going to take a knife and stab you! Then she’s laughing like an idiot. What’s wrong with her? She’s like Sybil!”
Faux-conservative co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin called the rebuttal “a disaster from start to finish” and had a meltdown over Britt doing it from a kitchen:
[…]She added that the scene gave off “creepy Lifetime movie” vibes and Behar chimed in again to proclaim that Britt “needs mood elevators!”
Co-host Ana Navarro, infamous for her wild and unhinged emotional outbursts, had the gall to say she was “worried” about Britt being in a kitchen because “she had knives so close” to her. “I thought she could go Chuckie on me at any time,” she proclaimed; being unoriginal and parroting Behar’s Sybil reference and explaining the mean-spirited joke: “Sybil the movie from ’76 about a lady with multiple personality disorder.”
“And I’m thinking to myself this lady shouldn’t be in a kitchen; she should be in a padded room!” Navarro shrieked.
Fondacaro didn’t bother to defend Britt (not yet, anyway) — perhaps because he knows there was no defense.
Clay Waters threw a lot of whataboutism at the New York Times for its critique of Britt:
The Republican rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address put fear in the hearts of New York Times reporters, judging by their hysterical reaction in Saturday’s edition, “Tone of Riposte by Rising G.O.P. Star Shifts Between Cheer and Gloom” by Michael Bender and Kayla Guo. The online headline was startling: “Katie Britt, With Smiles and Menace, Delivers G.O.P. Response to Biden.”
One can imagine a world in which a Republican politician would be accused of sexist for calling, say, Kamala Harris “menacing.” Or is the Times intimidated by an intense woman?
“Menace” got changed to “Fierce Glare” in the headline at some point, but the menacing tone remained in the story, as Bender and Guo seemed averse to any kind of criticism of Biden after his supposed moment of pugilistic partisan glory.
[…]At this point, we might want to remind Bender & Guo that their newspaper very much “painted a dark picture of an America in decline” during the Trump years. Their feelings about America depend on which party is in charge.
Like Fondacaro, Waters offered no actual defense of Britt.
Tim Graham raged that Britt’s performance was mocked on “Saturday Night Live”:
In the cold open of NBC’s Saturday Night Live ‘comedy’ program, the cast briefly and lightly touched on President Biden’s State of the Union speech, and then put on actress Scarlett Johansson (wife of cast member/fake news anchor Colin Jost) to caricature Sen. Katie Britt as the self-proclaimed “craziest bitch in the Target parking lot.”
This included mocking her cross necklace with a QVC-style graphic, that she could wear it from “da church to da club.” Conservative Christians, always consider them fakers.
Just as ‘SNL’ mocked Rep. Elise Stefanik instead of top college presidents who expressed great tolerance for vicious anti-Semitic speech on campus, they presented Biden as giving a strong speech after their Biden (who’s letting Mikey Day do this?) said “You know, I’d stay here and talk to y’all more, but I saw a glimpse of the Republican senator’s response to my speech, and I think she’s going to help me more than anything else I can say here. Enjoy.”
Graham whined that the sketch busted Britt for the factually devoid anecdote she used:
The writers wanted to get in a fact-checking line about sex-trafficking: “But first and foremost, I’m a mom. And like any mom, I’m going to do a pivot out of nowhere into a shockingly violent story about sex trafficking. And rest assured, every detail about it is real, except the year, where it took place, and who was president when it happened.”
That, of course, is more fact-checking of Britt than Graham or anyone else at the MRC will ever do — and Graham will never tell his reader that even the sex-trafficking victim whose story Britt appropriated complained about being exploited to advance her partisan agenda. But even after conceding that Britt’s performance was mockworthy, Graham couldn’t stop playing whataboutism:
Anyone could have seen Senator Britt’s scenery-chewing performance and known that NBC would do this parody. What’s shameless is they kid Biden like they’d kid their uncle, and Kamala Harris is never portrayed as an over-ambitious Veep type who tosses word salads. It must be good to be a Democrat.
(On the other hand, Craig Bannister — who currently runs the right-wing blog that was once the MRC’s “news” division, CNSNews.com, devoted a needlessly lengthy post to complaining that CNN “mischaracterized Sen. Britt’s comments about Biden’s border policies in order to claim Britt ‘got many of her facts wrong,'” insisting that “Liberal media are distorting her comments and attacking her, in order to distract Americans from the real issue – the horrific tragedy allowed and invited by a lack of border security.”)
Fondacaro returned for another hate-watch of “The View” on March 11, in which he admitted Britt screwed up but still insisted on defending her bogus sex-trafficking story anyway:
After initially maligning Alabama Republican Senator Katie Britt for her less-than-stellar rebuttal to President Biden’s State of the Union address on Friday, the vicious liberals of ABC’s The View were back to attacking her on Monday. They decried Britt’s focuses on Democratic Party open-border policies and arguing it led to migrant women getting raped along the journey. And despite the fact that The View chose to talk about Britt again, moderator Whoopi Goldberg hypocritically whined that it kept them from talking about the real violence in Haiti and Africa.
The View’s biggest problem with Britt’s focus on migrant rapes, and where they tried to put the most distance between Democratic open-border policies and their consequences, was that they supposedly only happened outside the United States, which somehow made them not as big of an issue as they otherwise should be.
“Just in that interview [Britt] said, ‘I’m talking about real things that happen with women in the cartels in Mexico,’ but your speech is about here and President Biden, like, what?” co-host Sara Haines scoffed.
As part of her self-inflicted wound, Britt cited a rape incident that happened under President George W. Bush, but faux-conservative co-host Ana Navarro also echoed Haines’s suggestion that a migrant being raped on their journey to the border didn’t count as a consequence of open-border policies.
“And she was trying to blame Joe Biden for something that happened 20 years under George W. Bush, in a different country. So, the level of misleading that this lady did, you know, just has — and she’s shameless about it,” Navarro huffed.
The woman in question, Carla Jacinto “testified in front of Congress about this” (as noted by Navarro) and the other faux-conservative, Alyssa Farah Griffin whined that Britt “didn’t have permission to” tell the story.
Fondacaro concluded by whining: “The View deliberately chose to talk again about Britt’s four-day-old speech, but that didn’t stop Goldberg from hypocritically whining that it kept them from talking about other important stuff.” Says the guy who spent a post whining that someone talked about a four-day-old speech.
We’ve already noted how the MRC’s Stephanie Hamill complained that during the Academy Awards, host Jimmy Kimmel “tied nominee Emma Stone’s character from the movie ‘Poor Things’ to the senator saying, ‘Emma played an adult woman with the brain of a child, like the lady who gave the rebuttal to the State of the Union on Thursday night.'”