The Republican Covid circus
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It’s real hard to sort out the current right wing orthodoxy on the Covid pandemic, as illustrated by today’s Senate hearing, chaired by the Mayor of Munchkin Land, who is completely obsessed with Anthony Fauci:
Dr Anthony Fauci refused to answer questions at a high-profile Senate committee hearing on the origins of Covid-19 and accused the Republican senator leading questioning of having an “unhinged obsession” with him.
Fauci, the veteran former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Niaid), served as a key adviser to Donald Trump and Joe Biden during the Covid-19 pandemic. The hearing was called by Republican Kentucky senator Rand Paul, who has investigated Fauci for years.
Fauci said Paul’s goal was “embarrassing and intimidating me”, and ultimately landing him “behind bars”.
“Therefore, although it pains me to do so, because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys I will invoke my right under the fifth amendment of the constitution to refrain from answering your questions,” Fauci said in his opening statement.
Paul, frustrated, later told reporters that he would hold a vote to hold Fauci in contempt of US Congress next week, and described the question of whether the fifth amendment could shield him as “a question for the courts”.
Fauci, 85, served under seven US presidents and through numerous health crises, including the HIV crisis, Ebola outbreaks and the first coronavirus outbreak, called Sars-CoV-1. He became a household name overnight when the Covid-19 pandemic halted social life in 2020.
Quickly after opening statements, the hearing became a back-and-forth between Paul and Fauci. Paul grew visibly agitated as Fauci refused to answer, threatened the scientists with “repercussions”, and then tossed one of Fauci’s attorneys from the hearing room.
As far as I can tell, the current orthodoxy features all of the following claims about Covid:
(1) It was never more than a bad cold, and all the precautions taken against it were nothing more than a power grab by crazed authoritarian bureaucrats.
(2) Those same bureaucrats covered up its true origins, and that coverup cost tens of millions of lives worldwide.
(3) The Covid vaccine was “dangerous experimental gene therapy,” and totally unnecessary (see (1) above).
(4) The Chinese released Covid as a deadly bioweapon from one of their tricksy Oriental labs, thereby killing millions of people (see (2) above).
(5) A woman in Ohio was forced to wear a mask at a high school football game, which when you think about it is not all that different from what happened during the Holocaust.
And so forth.
Robert Frost once said that writing free verse was like playing tennis with the net down. I don’t know about that, but I do know that right wing intellectual argument is like playing tennis with no net and no lines and no opponent, because you can make up whatever “facts” you need at any moment, logical consistency isn’t a mystery, it’s more like a rumor, and contradicting yourself from one sentence to the next just proves you’re the übermensch or Walt Whitman but definitely not gay.