WASHINGTON: US Senator Katie Britt on Sunday defended her Republican rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, as critics and a famous actor piled on with cutting riffs on her remarks.
The 42-year-old Britt was a little-known junior senator from Alabama when Republicans selected her for the traditional role of offering the party’s response to the president’s annual message before Congress.
But the setting she chose — her family kitchen — as well as her sometimes awkward delivery and a misleading effort to link Biden to a sex-trafficking incident that happened long before he took office, have drawn furious pushback.
A sharply satirical take on late-night TV, with superstar Scarlett Johansson as Britt, added fuel to the fire.
The real Britt, in the remarks from her kitchen, sharply denounced Biden’s border policies as “a disgrace,” telling the brutal account of a Mexican woman who, at 12, was sex-trafficked and repeatedly raped.
The strong implication was that the abuse occurred during Biden’s watch.
But when fact-checkers dug into the story it quickly emerged that the sex-trafficking occurred in Mexico, involved no effort to cross the border — and took place while George W. Bush was president.
Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Britt insisted she had made it clear she was talking about something that happened years before.
In fact, she said, “human trafficking has gone up under President Biden,” adding: “It’s disgusting to try to silence... the story of what it is like to be sex-trafficked.”
Donald Trump, Biden’s virtually certain opponent in November elections, praised Britt’s performance. But even conservative commentators chastised her choice of setting.
“Senator Katie Britt is a very impressive person,” commentator Alyssa Farah Griffin wrote on X, adding, “I do not understand the decision to put her in a *KITCHEN* for one of the most important speeches she’s ever given.”
Britt’s response on Fox: “Republicans care about kitchen-table issues. We are talking about the issues that women care about.”
Rebuttal speeches often spotlight a young, rising star of the opposition party, and Britt’s relative youth provided an obvious contrast to the octogenarian president.
But Johansson’s eery portrayal of Britt on “Saturday Night Live,” a program popular with young viewers, was scathing.
“I’m not just a senator,” she says, “I’m a wife, a mother and the craziest bitch in the Target parking lot.”
As to the sex-trafficking story, Johansson says: “Rest assured, every detail about it is real, except the year, where it took place and who was president when it happened.”
Young Republican senator’s rebuttal to Biden draws bipartisan gibes
https://arab.news/6a3fd
Young Republican senator’s rebuttal to Biden draws bipartisan gibes
- Rebuttal speeches often spotlight a young, rising star of the opposition party, and Britt’s relative youth provided an obvious contrast to the octogenarian president
Afghanistan says it thwarted Pakistani airstrike on Bagram Air Base as fighting enters fourth day
- The fighting has been the most severe between the neighbors for years
- Pakistan accuses Taliban government of harboring militant groups that stage attacks against it
KABUL: Afghanistan thwarted attempted airstrikes on Bagram Air Base, the former US military base north of Kabul, authorities said Sunday, while cross-border fighting between Pakistan and Afghanistan stretched into a fourth day.
The fighting has been the most severe between the neighbors for years, with Pakistan declaring that it’s in “open war” with Afghanistan.
The conflict has alarmed the international community, particularly as the area is one where other militant organizations, including Al-Qaeda and the Daesh group, still have a presence and have been trying to resurface.
Pakistan accuses Afghanistan’s Taliban government of harboring militant groups that stage attacks against it and also of allying with its archrival India.
Border clashes in October killed dozens of soldiers, civilians and suspected militants until a Qatari-mediated ceasefire ended the intense fighting. But several rounds of peace talks in Turkiye in November failed to produce a lasting agreement, and the two sides have occasionally traded fire since then.
On Sunday, the police headquarters of Parwan province, where Bagram is located, said in a statement that several Pakistani military jets had entered Afghan airspace “and attempted to bomb Bagram Air Base” at around 5 a.m.
The statement said Afghan forces responded with “anti-aircraft and missile defense systems” and had managed to thwart the attack.
There was no immediate response from Pakistan’s military or government regarding Kabul’s claim of attempted airstrikes on Bagram or the ongoing fighting.
Bagram was the United States’ largest military base in Afghanistan. It was taken over by the Taliban as they swept across the country and took control in the wake of the chaotic US withdrawal from the country in 2021. Last year, US President Donald Trump suggested he wanted to reestablish a US presence at the base.
The current fighting began when Afghanistan launched a broad cross-border attack on Thursday night, saying it was in retaliation for Pakistani airstrikes the previous Sunday.
Pakistan had said its airstrike had targeted the outlawed Pakistani Taliban, also known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP. Afghanistan had said only civilians were killed.
The TTP militant group, which is separate but closely allied with Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, operates inside Pakistan, where it has been blamed for hundreds of deaths in bombings and other attacks over the years.
Pakistan accuses Afghanistan’s Taliban government of providing a safe haven within Afghanistan for the TTP, an accusation that Afghanistan denies.
After Thursday’s Afghan attack, Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Mohammad Asif declared that “our patience has now run out. Now it is open war between us.”
In the ongoing fighting, each side claims to have killed hundreds of the other side’s forces — and both governments put their own casualties at drastically lower numbers.
Two Pakistani security officials said that Pakistani ground forces were still in control on Sunday of a key Afghan post and a 32-square-kilometer area in the southern Zhob sector near Kandahar province, after having seized it during fighting Friday. The captured post and surrounding area remain under Pakistani control, they added. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity, because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.
In Kabul, the Afghan government rejected Pakistan’s claims. Deputy government spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat called the reports “baseless.”
Afghan officials said that fighting had continued overnight and into Sunday in the border areas.
The police command spokesman for Nangarhar province, Said Tayyeb Hammad, said that anti-aircraft missiles were used from the provincial capital, Jalalabad, and surrounding areas on Pakistani fighter jets flying overhead Sunday morning.
Defense Ministry spokesman Enayatulah Khowarazmi said that Afghan forces had launched counterattacks with snipers across the border from Nangarhar, Paktia, Khost and Kandahar provinces overnight. He said that two Pakistani drones had been shot down and dozens of Pakistani soldiers had been killed.
Fitrat said that Pakistani drone attacks hit civilian homes in Nangarhar province late Saturday, killing a woman and a child, while mortar fire killed another civilian when it hit a home in Paktia province.
There was no immediate response to the claims from Pakistani officials.
