It’s going to be awful
I’m not sure I understand why, but every time I read about the Republican plan to persecute Dr. Anthony Fauci the minute they gain a majority, I feel the anger well up in me like nothing else. It reminds me of the persecution of intellectuals, scientists and artists in Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Fauci’s planned humiliation will beat the hands of Rand Paul, the supposed “libertarian” who has revealed himself as the authoritarian cretin we always knew him to be:
Congressional Republicans are eagerly floating investigations into Anthony Fauci and the Biden administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic if they win back control of the House or Senate in the midterm elections.
“One way or another, if we are in the majority, we will subpoena his records and he will testify in the Senate under oath,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who is in line to become the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee if Republicans win the majority with the panel’s current ranking member, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), retiring.
Republicans have not been shy about launching probes into the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic, focusing on the origins of the virus and whether the federal government — and by extension, Fauci — helped fund controversial research that might have played a role in its creation.
While Republicans have been in the minority, those investigations have not gained much momentum. But with the majority, the GOP would have the authority to lob subpoenas at the administration to force it to hand over documents.
“If we win in November, if I’m chairman of a committee, if I have subpoena power, we’ll go after every one of [Fauci’s] records,” Paul said earlier this year.
Public health experts said a hard look needs to be taken at the totality of the U.S. response to the pandemic across both the Trump and Biden administrations, but without getting into partisan finger-pointing.
“If you want to have a hearing, you need it to be a credible one. And that has to have a purpose. Other than going out to an 81 year old man,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.
Benjamin has been among health advocates pushing for an independent commission modeled on the 9/11 Commission to be formed to examine the pandemic response.
“It should be designed to actually get to the right answers. Until they do that, you know, they’re gonna continue to politicize it,” Benjamin said.
Fauci is a career government official who has become a political lightning rod and a villain in the eyes of many on the right. Conservative media has painted him as a scapegoat for many of the nation’s missteps over the pandemic.
Paul, a libertarian ophthalmologist, has repeatedly antagonized the nation’s top infectious diseases doctor over the benefits of masks, vaccinations and the origins of COVID-19.
They also plan to blame him and his unit at the NIH for COVID. They say he financed experiments in Wuhan, China that they say were then purposefully spread to the population. In QANON circles he is accused of being a comic book evil mastermind responsible for the deaths of millions. I’m not kidding.
The Republican Party is planning to degrade and humiliate him publicly based upon all these lies. That’s not a “kitchen table issue” and I think it’s probably important that people recognize the stakes in allowing the GOP to gain a majority in November. Is having a tantrum over gas prices worth the horrors they are going to unleash?