Katie Britt Walks Back Lying About Border, Wonders Where Her Oscar Nomination Is
Katie Britt Walks Back Lying About Border, Wonders Where Her Oscar Nomination Is
How do you make Tommy Tuberville only the second-worst Alabama senator?
Hey, check out this rhyme we just came up with before we’d even finished our first cup of coffee:
There once was a lady named Katie Britt
Who was so galactically full of shit.
She lied on TV,
For everyone to see,
Perhaps the Senate she should quit.
Eat your heart out, William Yeats.
Yes, the fallout continues for Katie Britt, who is remarkably managing to challenge Tommy Tuberville for the title of “Worst Senator from Alabama.”
Britt spent Sunday doing a little damage control after journalist Jonathan Katz’s debunking of her sex trafficking story blew up online. Personally, we think her time would have been better spent in church praying on all the lying, but a) who knows, maybe she’s one of those evangelicals who thinks God wants them to lie to serve his greater Glory or whatever, and b) she’s already decided to be a professional politician in the GOP, at this point praying for forgiveness is about as useful as, well, praying for anything else.
So Britt went on “Fox News Sunday” to tell Shannon Bream that she did not actually blame Joe Biden for a girl being sex trafficked in Mexico City in 2004, and the media knows this but of course the media isn’t being straight with America:
“Well 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 a teenager, I didn't say a young woman, a grown woman, a woman when she she was trafficked when she was 12. And so listening to her story, she is a victim's right advocate who who is telling, this is what drug cartels are doing, this is how they're profiting off of women, and it is disgusting. And so I am hopeful that it brings some light to it and we can actually do something about human trafficking ,and that's what the media actually decides to cover.”
Unluckily for Katie Britt, there is a transcript and about a zillion recordings of her speech from Thursday night, and also there are people in America who know how words work when you put them all together. Let’s look at the relevant portion:
“We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days.
When I first took office, I did something different. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas, where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12. 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.
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 start acting like it.
President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace. It’s despicable. And it’s almost entirely preventable.”
So the breakdown is a) mention Biden, b) tell horrific story, c) punctuate the story by mentioning Biden again, thus tying him in the listener’s mind to this woman’s sex trafficking nightmare.
This tells us nothing about the truthfulness of the story. All it tells us is that Katie Britt took an Intro to Rhetoric class in college. She could have completely toned down her Gloria-Swanson-in-Sunset-Boulevard performance on Thursday night and delivered the speech like a normal human being who wasn’t zonked on her kid’s ADHD medication, and people still would have had the same takeaway.
Hey, you know who else thinks Britt is so full of it that her shoes squish when she walks? The woman whose story she shared. Karla Jacinto told CNN over the weekend that Mexican politicians had long used her story for political purposes, and she was very unhappy to see an American politician do the same thing:
“I work as a spokesperson for many victims who have no voice, and I really would like them to be empathetic: all the governors, all the senators, to be empathetic with the issue of human trafficking … People who are really trafficked and abused, as she [Britt] mentioned. And I think she [Britt] should first take into account what really happens before telling a story of that magnitude.”
Jacinto also reiterated that she was not trafficked by drug cartels, but rather by a pimp, and that her story took place far from the border, and also it took place when George W. Bush was president.
Katie Britt knew what she was doing, let us dispense with this notion that she (or her speechwriter) did not know what she was doing.
As a palette cleanser, please enjoy the inevitable Saturday Night Live parody of Britt’s speech, which was … not terrible? Pretty well done, even? Maybe Scarlett Johansson should do more guest appearances, she’s got good timing.
[YouTube]
Wonkette is fueled by both anger at politicians blatantly lying and your generous donations.
talk about humiliation rituals
I know it's a day later but can we just all stop a minute and consider that this woman named one of her actual literal sons "Ridgeway"?
"Ridgeway" isn't something you name a person. It's something you name an independent convenience store on NY Route 5 with no gas pumps. That poor kid!