I've been dipping in and out of Dr. Anthony Fauci's latest command performance before the flying monkeys of the House of Representatives, this time in front of a subcommittee of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee. Ostensibly, this was about the country's response to the pandemic and what lessons can be drawn to improve that response in case of the next one. The actual purpose, of course, was to use Fauci as a piñata again in order to gin up the rubes back home.

Yes, dear friends, we are back with the LAB LEAK!!!!! And, of course, GAIN OF FUNCTION! Ranking Member Dr. Raul Ruiz, Democrat of California, was quick to call bullshit, not that it mattered to the majority, which was cutting campaign commercials on the taxpayer's dime.

"So I want to be very clear on this point that the funding in the research conducted by EcoHealth did not produce Sars-cov-2. That doesn't negate that this could have come from another lab that was doing research, and that it leaked from a lab is still a possibility. But it was not funded by NIAID or NIH. And just for the record, this information was provided by NIH to the Oversight ranking member James Comer nearly three years ago on October 2021."

So despite the clear evidence that Dr. Fauci and his agency did not fund gain of function research under the P3CO regulatory definition and that the virus studied under the federally funded grant EcoHealth Alliance Grant could not have been the progenitor virus for Sars-cov-2. Republicans have levied these unsubstantiated allegations knowing very well that they are not true. They've done so to push their extreme partisan narrative that Dr. Fauci and our nation's public health officials caused the Covid-19 pandemic."

And Rep. Jamie Raskin, (R-Maryland), just couldn't resist.

He (Fauci) is an honorable public servant who has devoted his entire career to the public health and the public interest. And he is not a comic book super villain. He did not fund research to create the Covid-19 pandemic. He did not lie to Congress about gain of function research...(He) did not organize a lab leak suppression campaign. His testimony, along with the thousands of pages of documents and dozens of closed-door testimony provided to House Republicans as part of the Covid origins investigation will dispel these hysterical claims and reveal that the people bowing down to a twice impeached convicted felon who told Americans to inject themselves with bleach now want you to believe not only a big political lie but a big medical lie...
...I want to join my colleague from Florida in apologizing to you that some of our colleagues in the United States House of Representatives want to drag your name through the mud. They're treating you, Dr. Fauci, like a convicted felon. Actually, you probably wish they treated you like a convicted felon. They treat convicted felons with love and admiration. Some of them blindly worship a convicted felon."

See? That isn't hard. Hang all the blunders and stupidity around his neck, and never mention him without using the primary modifier, "Convicted Felon." And stick up for decent public servants into the bargain.

Headshot of Charles P. Pierce
Charles P. Pierce

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.