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Killing The Messenger Dept: Somehow going still lower, Republicans - aka "you absolute fucking pieces of shit" - just hauled Dr. Anthony Fauci into a Senate hearing to charge the guy who saved three million lives with "sabotaging" a dog heartworm pill, wanting to be a megalomanic "sun god," destroying "Americans' trust in their government" and probs being "responsible for this entire pandemic." In response, Fauci, "the man they cannot forgive for being right," declined to answer any of their "questions."

Wednesday's hearing, born of a GOP so desperate they've resorted to, "Ok, but remember the pandemic?", offered dismal proof that bowdlerizing science remains a key right-wing tactic, and Fauci - a Cornell-trained, 85-year-old immunologist and infectious disease specialist who spent over 50 years in public service - its main punching bag. Fauci, who evil dimwit Steve Bannon thought should be beheaded, served almost 40 years as head of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Niaid) under seven presidents, from Reagan, who hired him, to George H. W. Bush, who cited him when asked to name someone he admired, to George W., who gave him a Presidential Medal of Freedom and asked him to design the historically successful AIDS relief PEPFAR, which saved over 25 million lives, most poor people in Africa.

In the 1980s, HIV/AIDS was one of multiple public health crises largely afflicting marginalized populations, along with Ebola and a first coronavirus, that Fauci confronted with grace and courage. "AIDS arrived attached to a despised population," notes one observer. "Fauci did not look away." He redirected research toward what was then deemed a plague "when it was neither safe nor popular," and when furious, screaming, ill AIDS activists stormed his office, he invited them in, listened to them, decided they were at least partly right and expedited clinical trials so patients could get quicker access to experimental drugs. Fierce AIDS activist Larry Kramer, who once called Fauci "an incompetent murderer," years later called him "the only true and great hero" among government officials of the time.

This week's hearing, called and convened under subpoena by rabid gadfly and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, was billed as an investigation into the origins of COVID, a legit scientific question that to some extent remains unresolved. For years, MAGA has chosen to blame an accidental "lab leak" from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology, and Paul has devoted much of his otherwise less-than-memorable political career to arguing, according to that theory, that Dr. Fauci “could be responsible for this entire pandemic” - because NIH once provided the Institute with a sub-grant. Most virologists and other health experts say it was more likely caused by the occasional "spillover event" of a virus jumping from an infected animal to a human, arguing the “preponderance” of evidence points to that natural origin.

Public health officials have stepped up to protest the government's “vilification and harassment" of American scientists,” and a group of 155 scientists wrote an open letter dismissing bizarre MAGA charges against Fauci - he covered up the origins of his own research, bribed or others to join him, holds patents on vaccines, is working with bad actors to suppress the awful truth - as "baseless...No credible evidence has been produced to support these absurd charges." Still, Paul's office spent last weekend dumping over 1,100 pages of Fauci’s private “diary” online; after blowback, they took them down, made redactions and reposted them. Inadvertently or no, they left in Fauci's various descriptions of Trump as “rambling,” “crazy,” “bumbling,” “incompetent,” “an idiot” and “truly an obnoxious adolescent.”

In a somber preamble, Fauci noted that over the decades he has testified, willingly and under oath, hundreds of times before Congress. He went on, "Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government," following the advice of his attorneys he would invoke the Fifth and "refrain from answering your questions." He also blasted Paul's "unhinged obsession" with him. Then, dozens of times over the next infuriating hours, he intoned, "On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.“ Later, one expert noted his carefully neutral body language during the ordeal: "He is refusing to participate in the confrontation beyond what is legally required.”

Paul quickly grew agitated by Fauci's calm stream of refusals. He threatened him with "repercussions" and with a charge of contempt. Heatedly refusing to allow any of Fauci's attorneys to join him - "The attorneys were not recognized," he snarled - at one point he called on security to escort out of the hearing room one lawyer after he attempted to speak with Fauci. "This is the way Anthony Fauci wants to be remembered - for a lawyer not recognizing the rules," he said. "Security, please remove him from the room.” The attorney gently patted Fauci on the shoulder and turned to leave on his own; a guard sheepishly trailed after him. In the audience, Laura Ingraham and other MAGA-ites applauded, because they have no shame and never will.

Rand and other Republicans tried to claim Fauci had no right to take the Fifth because Biden issued him a preemptive pardon that eliminated that privilege, an ongoing debate in some legal circles. What is not debated though Repubs tried to argue otherwise: Invoking the Fifth Amendment is not a confession of guilt, but a foundational right against self-incrimination as long as there exists a valid threat of prosecution. Most pointedly, the Fifth does not represent guilt but "the ordinary caution" of any citizen who is dragged before a hostile panel by a vindictive chairman vowing for years to put him behind bars, and who "understands this hearing was "never a search for information but a search for a crime - of having stood in public and told a frightened country the truth, while a president lied to it."

Public health experts now say roughly 40% of America's million-plus COVID deaths, representing hundreds of thousands of lives, could have been prevented under more effective federal policies. But because they were caused by an idiotic malignant narcissist tragically unable to admit he's ever fucked up - or to allow anyone around him to admit it - the lies keep spewing. Last year the White House published a paper on the lab-leak theory as a rationale to defund the NIH, justify cutting over a billion dollars in state and local health funding, and gut cancer and Alzheimers research; now, citing that lame lie and dreaded diversity, they're trying to put the entire $1 trillion federal grant apparatus under the control of political appointees. This week, in honor of Paul's hearing, Trump wrote Dr. Fauci’s ideas were "CRAZY."

On Wednesday, MAGA dutifully jumped in. Cowardly slimebag Josh Hawley, who fist-pumped then ran away from the mob who smeared shit on the Capitol walls, said Fauci had no right to invoke the Fifth, "This is about contempt for this body and the American people," and, yuge pot/kettle, the good doctor was a lying megalomaniac who "wanted to be the sun god." Bernie Moreno demanded Fauci apologize for his crimes and sneered, "Who the fuck did you think you were?" Roger Marshall, an alleged doctor, said vaccine lies "made Americans not trust their government," though unvaxxed MAGA died at twice the rate of Dems. Ron Johnson called a vaccine that saved millions of lives "an experimental gene therapy, and accused Fauci of lying in his own diary, eliciting the day's only smile from him.

Later, a frustrated Paul told reporters he would hold Fauci in contempt, though it's not up to him. Besides, notes Tom Wellborn, the spectacle wasn't really about answers to questions; it was about a mob of willfully ignorant quacks and losers finding an imaginary villain. "Fauci was the man on the screen," he writes. "He absorbed the rage that had nowhere else to go." Above all, Fauci was hated, not for lying, but for "telling the truth to people who did not want to hear it." He "stood between the American public and a president who wanted the problem to vanish before an election," who suggested insane things - Ivermectin, disinfectant, lights - as Fauci carefully contradicted him, "trying to keep his job long enough to keep being useful."

Fauci wasn't a saint, Wellborn writes, and he wasn't right about everything. But he was "right about the things that mattered most" - it was airborne, masks and distance helped. He "told the truth as the science understood it at the time, and when the science changed, as science does, he changed the guidance, and his enemies have spent years calling those updates lies." Meanwhile, "he saved lives, and they were on the other side." Most vital: To remember "that in the summer of 2026, a man who had given his entire adult life to keeping other people alive was hauled before a hostile Senate by a colleague nursing a personal vendetta... and which of the two men in that room had spent his life saving strangers, and which spent his trying to jail the person who did."