Another week of mayhem and mendacity in the books, and the thing that bugged me most was the show trial of Anthony Fauci in the Senate, at which the good doctor wisely and repeatedly took the Fifth because the rightwingers were very clearly laying perjury traps for him so as to get around Biden’s preemptive pardon. Partly I’m pissed because Fauci, even before struggling to save the shitshow Tubby made of the COVID crisis, did great work on HIV/AIDS at the National Institutes of Health (probably part of what they hate him for), and anyone who fucks with the NIH crew is on my shitlist forever. But mainly it’s that this whole insane thing is such a vivid metaphor for everything that’s wrong with this stupid country in what Faine Greenwood has dubbed on Bluesky "our era of total Stupid Immoral Asshole ascendancy... [in which] all the competent people who believe in doing a good job for the sake of it conclude that they’re actively being punished for these qualities, while malignantly stupid criminals are making bank."
For one thing, that after his illustrious public service Fauci has to fend off death threats and malicious prosecution by the scum of the earth -- while the madman Kennedy runs NIH into the ground -- is like a Soviet-era satire come to life. Sovietical, too, is the way the Prestige Press is cooperating with the wingnuts to slur the guy, based largely on purloined diary entries that show Fauci noticing that the crisis had both made him suddenly famous and revealed, less suddenly, the President to be a moron -- unremarkable observations that the media dipshits now use to make Fauci out to be a monster of ambition and ego. From the New York Fucking Times:
More than 1,100 pages long and dating from 2019 to 2022, Dr. Fauci’s diary reads like a black comedy of manners in which a 79-year-old social-climbing scientist becomes the face of the government’s response to a pandemic and then the toast of the town — the toast of this town. As the death toll rises, so too does the doctor’s status and self-regard. He falls in with a fast crowd and becomes consumed by his own image.It’s like Thackeray’s Vanity Fair crossed with The Plague by Camus.
Shawn McCreesh, author of this atrocity, is like Sinclair Lewis’ Chum Frink crossed with Andrei Zhdanov. He can wrestle Matthew Hennessey for biscuits in Hell. Oh, and the Times put Bret Stephens and Frank Bruni on it, too, and they both agree that Fauci’s diary is a terrible scandal. Here’s Bruni, who I had forgotten sucks: “This was the opposite of a call for comity, cooperation and a big tent. It was a call for rancor, rivalry and a catty clique.” The Conscience of the Cooking Section! I'd wonder what his diary looks like, except careerist drips like him probably don't express any honest and unexpected opinions even in private.
Meanwhile at the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan opens her wizened maw to tell us that Fauci taking the Fifth “plus his diary may well have been a reputation-destroying event.” God grant it is, but not the way she and the rest of them mean it.
Well, courage, brothers and sisters, here are a couple of free ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN items released from behind the paywall that churn some humor out of our long national nightmare. First, we visit the centrist Democratic consultants of the Kitchen Table Institute, who are working overtime (or at least billing it) to disabuse the American voters of their distaste for Netanyahu and the Iran War. Then, we go to the Oval Office to track the deterioration -- at every level -- of the Chief Executive. Enjoy!
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