Post by sagobob on Aug 25, 2022 11:53:19 GMT -8
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci on Wednesday, calling for someone to “grab” the nation’s top infectious disease expert and “chuck him across the Potomac.”
“I’m just sick of seeing him! I know he says he’s going to retire. Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac,” DeSantis, a possible 2024 presidential candidate, said to cheers during a campaign stop on his “Keep Florida Free Tour.”
Thank you, Dr. Fauci!
For the last three years, this trim, gray-haired doctor with the wire-rimmed glasses has been the vessel into which the country has poured all its fears and frustrations. He is hero and tormentor. Truth-teller and unreliable narrator. He has borne our angst. And through it all, he’s shown the public nothing but patience and decency — and only the occasional flares of angry exasperation mostly reserved for a senator named Rand Paul (R-Ky.) whose preferred response to the pandemic might be summed up as do-as-little-as-possible.
Throughout his career, Fauci, 81, has dealt with a host of virologic menaces — AIDS, Zika, Ebola, covid-19 — but it may be that none have been quite so confounding as disinformation, as the disregard for facts, as the demonization of intelligent inquiry. This is a scourge of our own deliberate making. As he said during a recent interview on MSNBC, the country is at a place “where we can see something in front of our very eyes and deny it’s happening.”
So many of our growing cultural bugaboos came to a head in our reckoning with Fauci. He is an intellectual at a time when many deem book-learning dangerous and cheap. He epitomizes academic journals and peer-reviewed articles. Meanwhile, folks are burning books they don’t like or they don’t understand or that simply make them sad. As a scientist Fauci deals in facts, when so many barter in free-floating feelings. He focuses on a singular truth, when so many others rhapsodize about speaking their personal truth. We want to kill the messenger, ignore his message and bury the horse he rode in on.