Psaki shrugs off Ted Cruz taunt that she’s ‘Peppermint Patty,’ says she’s big fan of Peanuts redhead

WASHINGTON – Disappointed at the lack of boos when he mentioned Jen Psaki, Sen. Ted Cruz prodded a conservative crowd in Orlando to vent their views at “Peppermint Patty.”

The White House press secretary shrugged off the taunt moments later, suggesting the Texas Republican would have to try harder to get under her freckled skin than to liken her to one of Charlie Brown’s pals in the Peanuts gang.

“Don’t tell him I like Peppermint Patty. So I’m not gonna take it too offensively,” Psaki responded when a Daily Mail reporter told her of Cruz’s swipe, injecting a moment of levity into a briefing focused on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Senator Cruz, I like Peppermint Patty. I’m a little tougher than that. But there you go,” she added.

Cruz took the jab during an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Early in his speech, Cruz railed at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Like other American conservatives, Cruz had supported a blockade by Canadian truckers protesting Trudeau’s COVID-19 restrictions. The mention of Trudeau drew a lusty chorus of boos.

“Let’s pause for a second and observe that it’s the first time in recorded history that any Canadian has ever elicited that much of a response from any crowd on planet Earth,” Cruz quipped.

(Some longtime Cruz watchers recalled the thundering boos when he refused to endorse Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican convention after their especially nasty race. The Texas Republican, born in Calgary, was a Canadian until he renounced his citizenship – which he and his parents didn’t realize he had – in 2014.)

A bit later in his Orlando speech, Cruz mentioned Psaki, stopping short when the audience gave no audible reaction.

“Come on,” he exhorted the crowd. “Jen Psaki doesn’t get the Justin Trudeau treatment? You know Peppermint Patty deserves some love.”

Cruz is not the first to notice a passing resemblance between the Peanuts character and the press secretary.

Psaki has distinctively red hair.

So does Peppermint Patty, at least in 2015′s The Peanuts Movie. In Charles M. Schultz’s comic strip, it was more auburn or even brown.

Both have freckles.

A running gag, as a Peanuts fan site recalls, is that Peppermint Patty is a bit dimwitted – an attribute that no one in the White House press corps would ascribe to Psaki.

For instance, Patty didn’t realize that Snoopy isn’t human until 1974, eight years after her first appearance in the strip. At one point she applies to a school for gifted children and, expecting to receive some presents, takes along a sack.

Cruz has been on the receiving end of plenty of nasty nicknames since his election to the Senate in 2012. Trump labeled him “Lyin’ Ted” during the 2016 contest, though they became close allies once Trump got to the White House.

The late Sen. John McCain called him “whacko bird.” Late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel calls him “Blobfish.”

Cruz has embraced the meme that he’s the Zodiac, a serial killer whose deeds were behind him by the time Cruz got to kindergarten. There’s “Cancun Ted.” And so on.

Psaki was hardly the only target of Cruz’s mockery at CPAC on Thursday.

He also joked that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rides a broom – coyly avoiding the term “witch.”

And he reveled in the chants of “Let’s go, Brandon” at football games and other gatherings. Conservatives have been using that as code for insulting President Joe Biden. It started after a live TV interview Oct. 2 with NASCAR driver Brandon Brown, who’d just won a race at Talladega Superspeedway. Chants jeering the president with the F-word were audible to viewers, but the reporter said it sounded like “Let’s go, Brandon.”

“Find me one person on planet earth who doesn’t know what ‘Let’s go, Brandon’ means?” Cruz said in Orlando. “That is powerful.”