Don’t worry we’ll get to Scarlet Johansson in a moment. But the ill-fated intersection of the movie star and the beastly politician Senator Ted Cruz needs some background, otherwise it’d be simply preposterous . . .
A week ago, the inimitable and illimitable Texas Senator Ted Cruz interviewed the precocious-for-a-12-year-old Alabama senator Katie Britt about her suicidal nose dive of a State of the Union Republican response to President Biden’s SOTU speech. So crushingly cringeworthy was her speech that Marco Rubio and Bobby Jindal sent her flowers for putting their own SOTU GOP responses in the shade; their speeches were disasters, Britt’s was cataclysmic.
Her GOP colleagues were stunned into silence, but not for long. The Guardian reported, that one Trump adviser wondered, “What the hell am I watching right now?” Another judged Britt to be “[O]ne of our biggest disasters ever,” and that in the era when their former president is facing nearly one hundred criminal charges. That’s how big a disaster Katie Britt engineered. And yet she was so cute, in a 1950s misogynistic way . . . telecast from her own kitchen with Rice Krispy bar yuck stuck to her apron.
In any event, below you can see how Senator Britt reacted to all this knife-wielding criticism, and, as a bonus, how Saturday Night Live portrayed her swan dive, and who portrayed her in the skit, i.e., the positively inimitable Scarlet Johansson, pictured above. And that, in turn, leads us to the Senate’s least leading man, Ted Cruz, who, on his nauseating podcast, pined unreservedly for Ms. Johansson. As we Cruz fans know, he consistently performs his inept portrayal of a real man, Texas MAGA style, when in truth, he is a cosmic weenie joke. And in this case he was at his weeniest.
“The thing that was the coolest is you’re played by Scarlett Johansson,” said Cruz.
“Scarlett Johansson is hot.”
He continued, “I am genuinely jealous ’cause, look, SNL has come after me a bunch of times, they don’t ever have Tom Cruise play me! How come you get a gorgeous movie star?… That is a real compliment that you ought to be pretty psyched with.”
And then the kicker:
“By the way, in terms of Republican portrayals, like they have had some vicious ones. Okay, let’s start off with at least you were played by a woman. So when SNL has had me, I’ve also been played by a woman.” As NPR reported, that was in November 2021 when Saturday Night Live “opened its show with a send-up of Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who had said a tweet from a children’s television character — in which Sesame Street‘s Big Bird discusses his COVID-19 vaccination — was ‘government propaganda.’ In the skit, Cruz — played by Aidy Bryant — hosts a right-wing alternative to Sesame Street called ‘Cruz Street.'”
When reached for comment about Ted’s quite obvious interest in the starlet, Ms. Johansson’s husband, Colin Jost, told us, “As soon as she heard, she grabbed her escape luggage and rushed to the airport, destination unknown, although we can report she is not bound for Cancun. Frankly, I don’t even know where she’ll land, and I miss her, but I understand her fears, and wish her well.”