Tag Archives: Anthony Fauci

It’s Time. Fauci and Birx Need to Resign.

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What’s happening to Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx is not a pleasant thing to watch. Though unknown to most of us before the pandemic, they built long and impressive careers, both by being competent in their profession and by carefully nurturing their reputations. Now though they’ve both becomes creatures of Trump culture, part of his supporting cast. A cast mostly of grotesques.

I know I’ve referred to this many times before, but it continues to apply over and over and over again. Everything Trump Touches Dies. (TM: Rick Wilson.) From the $400 million (in 2020 dollars) shoveled to him by his Klansman father, which he proceeded to squander, to his mis-managed airline, his bogus university, his fraudulent foundation, all his ex-wives, his porn star hookups, bankrupt casinos and mistreatment of lackeys like Chris Christie, Reince Preibus, Paul Manafort, Rex Tillerson, H.R. McMaster, Lev and Igor, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Paul Ryan and on and on, Trump has either sullied or compounded the self-sullying of everyone he’s drawn into his wobbling orbit.

And now it’s Fauci and Birx’ turn.

Fauci has been noticeably absent from Trump’s most recent afternoon press rallies, including last Thursday’s where it was up to a stricken-looking Deborah Birx to tap-dance and prevaricate around Trump’s brain-seizing riffs on injecting disinfectants and sticking UV lights up our where-evers. Then Sunday, Birx was the one pushed out on “Meet the Press” and Jake Tapper to explain away some more and deflect attention from what the rest of the entire planet of intelligent humans regarded, unmistakably, as lethal misinformation wrapped around unconscionable ignorance.

I take no pleasure in saying Birx has torched her credibility, but her feet are on fire. She has in effect become a Trump enabler. Which is to say her role, publicly, has become less that of an advisor and more that of an apologist. She’s become the loyal assistant to an ill-informed, anti-science demagogue, which is precisely the opposite of the virtues she built her reputation on over forty years in her chosen profession. To stay any longer, she is risking historic culpability in what will be regarded as the most catastrophic failure of presidential leadership in American history. (And yes, I know I’ve said that before, too. But it bears repeating, like a mantra.)

People like Fauci and Birx, at the top of their bureaucratic food chains, have talents beyond “mere” scientific knowledge. Fauci in particular is regarded as a remarkably skillful player at the game of massaging, finessing and herding serious, high-brow egos toward a common goal. But in Trump, a narcissistic sociopath who can’t tell the difference between the Hippocratic Oath and Fantasia’s dancing hippos, there is no foundation in knowledge or professional empathy to work with.

In Fauci and Birx we are … again … looking at career company players who can not break free of the rules and protocols that brought them stature and prominence. Like former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, former Chief of Staff and Marine General John Kelly, ex-oil company CEO Tillerson, whoever wrote “Anonymous”, former Goldman, Sachs President Gary Cohn and even Robert Mueller, Fauci and Birx to this point have not been able to say what must be said. Namely, that Donald Trump not only has no clue what he’s talking about, but has no capacity whatsoever to deal with the biggest crisis the country has faced since WWII.

Like the other estimable reputations mentioned above, Fauci and Birx have so far refused to accept that the rules that brought them to this point of their careers have no weight or value in proximity to Trump. He regards their credibility and sense of duty to the standards of their profession as exploitable weaknesses to be bent to the service … of his reputation, which is to say the fantasy he creates for it.

The irony is that were they to announce their resignations — with unequivocal criticism of the stark, on-going failures of Trump — their standing as the foremost go-to truth-tellers on the pandemic would only increase. Trump would no doubt do everything he could to vilify and demote both. But since each would remain deep in the loop in terms of the science and logistics of pandemic response, they would remain vital, much sought after sources of critical information.

Given a choice between a daily unfettered Fauci & Birx pandemic update or one from their Trump-appointed replacements, (Jared? Pence?), which would you watch? Which would you believe?

More to the point, out from under the reputation-poisoning weight of Trump enabling they could speak freely and like intelligent adults to an adult public.

If Now Isn’t the Time to Assess Blame When Is?

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In every American crisis there’s a moment like the one after the 2018 Parkland High School slaughter. A woman found her way into an exclusive Republican fund-raising event on toney Key Biscayne across the water from downtown Miami. She wheedled her way through the crowd of politicians and big ticket donors until she found Paul Ryan, then Speaker of the House.

Polite and deferential to start, she eventually asked Ryan if he was, “Here celebrating the death of 17 children.” At this point the silver-tongued Ryan waved her off saying that despite being the star attraction at a political fund-raiser he, “didn’t want to talk politics”. The line is a variation on the tried and true, “Now is not the time to talk [insert whatever the crisis of the moment is all about.]” (Here’s a few more examples of the same thing.)

There’s an amusing but deadly dark tussle going on amid the torrent of COVID-19 news. This, in case you’ve been distracted by the rapidly escalating death toll, the administration ordering thousands of body bags and dodging basic questions like when will it produce enough tests to moderate the near total lockdown of American society, is the matter of suing FoxNews and other key members of the right-wing disinformation network. For what? For their culpability in the spread of the contagion.

Sharp-witted and sharp-elbowed tech columnist Kara Swisher launched into Sean Hannity in her Tuesday column, using her 80 year-old mother, a Hannity super-fan as an example of the very high cost of the crap (a polite word) regularly spewed by Hannity to his millions of credulous listeners and viewers.

“Facebook was not my mother’s source of misinformation (in fact, the company has been trying to improve in this area). It was not the fault of Dr. Google, which has at least pushed out more good information than bad. And my mom doesn’t use Twitter. Instead, it was Fox, the whole Fox and nothing but the Fox. Many children of older parents have come to know this news diet as the equivalent of extreme senior sugar addiction mixed with a series of truly unpleasant and conspiracy-laden doughnuts.”

While a lawsuit over Fox’s role in feeding Donald Trump and TrumpNation ludicrously erroneous and arguably lethal misinformation, to the point that Fox-Trumpers continued on with activities that led to the infection and deaths of god knows how many others is a delicious thing to imagine. A kind of Scopes Trial for the Trump era. Another sweaty courthouse lawn somewhere. Perhaps Palm Beach in July. A trial of not just Trump, but the larger network of astonishingly cynical interests that have enabled and invested in him.

But that, as Swisher writes, isn’t going to happen. Modern America doesn’t work that way. Nevertheless, Hannity has gone ballistic, calling Swisher every name he can use on air (and Twitter) while – of course – failing to disprove any of the accusations of naked mendacity she posed against him.

He’s sweating. He can feel the first draft of history’s dim view of what he’s done.

TrumpNation is up on its arthritic hind legs, snarling and hissing through the few good incisors they have left that liberals are exploiting the pandemic to undermine Trump. It’s a more personalized, cultish variation on, “Now is not the time … to assess blame for how bad this pandemic has become in the richest and most technologically advanced society on the planet.”

But it very much is. Now is the time to make damn certain there is no doubt in a fat majority of Americans’ minds why this is as bad as it is, and why it could have been much less worse. Fewer infected. Fewer dead. Fewer livelihoods destroyed.

Given everything that is known and provable — just at this point in the crisis — of what Trump knew, what he was told by our intelligence agencies, by the likes of the CDC’s Dr. Nancy Messonier and what he then failed to do, what diametrically opposed “untruths” he told his gullible, credulous fan base about the likelihood and lethality of what was coming is nothing less than a catastrophic failure of character and duty.

And as much as I wish I could say that is hyperbolic. It’s not. Look around you.

Among the Usual Sage Heads of punditry and establishment media there’s this attitude that it’s est to wait. “This will all get sorted out once the crisis is over,” and “there will government hearings.” Please. As with any meaningful response to our weekly gun slaughter, “Now is not the time … ” is the all-important first step to … doing nothing. To letting the perps skate, and enduring the same tragedy all over again.

If you’re out there rattling your phone lines, your e-mail, your Facebook postings, your Zoom meet-ups, your Twitter accounts and your socially distant dog walks with your neighbors pounding the point that this is, verifiably and conclusively, the worst failure of an American president in the country’s history and that it is still failing, good on you. That’s informed citizenship. That’s a sonic wave with potentially critical vibrations.

In order to defeat the virus, fraud and incompetence have to be brought under control … now. Not a year from now in some musty D.C. hearing room with Devin Nunes cross-examining Anthony Fauci.

Governors and mayors and first responders have their hands (too) full because of Trump (and FoxNew’s) malfeasance and mendacity. Support them every way you can. But don’t mistake the importance, right now and for weeks and months to come, of seizing this moment.

What moment? The moment to write history. To establish beyond any doubt who fcked up and how badly. As you may have heard, history is written by the victors.