Dr. Fauci stonewalls Senate Republicans, Pleads the Fifth

Senator Rand Paul and his GOP colleagues really wanted to fight with Fauci today. Instead, the stopped playing games with them.

Watching Senator Rand Paul’s hearing with Dr. Fauci was quite something. The types of corruption that Republicans are hyper-focused on, trying to prove Fauci was engaged in, are all the types of things that Donald Trump has actually done.

We all lived through COVID and we all watched Trump screw up the pandemic response. We watched ignorant Republicans politicize mask-wearing, social distancing, lockdowns and, later, vaccines.

We all watched Trump and Republicans rewrite history by concocting conspiratorial stories that paint Fauci as a dark, money-grubbing con man who manipulated the government to steal millions of taxpayer dollars and was responsible for the unnecessary deaths of thousands of Americans.

Except, that’s exactly what Trump did during the pandemic and the type of behavior he has been engaged in ever since.

So many of these Republican senators who harassed Fauci today are responsible for COVID deaths in their own states because they were too irresponsible, politically motivated and emotionally immature to stop vilifying common-sense precautions like social distancing and masking—basic stuff that, for decades, you might do if you were immunocompromised and it was flu season. When it came to COVID, we were all immunocompromised and it was the worst of flu seasons.

Republicans didn’t even have the backbone to stand up against obvious misinformation campaigns about Ivermectin, a drug used to treat parasites in horses and intestinal worm infections in humans—not a virus like COVID.

Instead of having the courage to admit they screwed up, and that the imbecile they worship also screwed up, they doubled downed, tripled downed on a failure of intellect and on a devolution of moral character.

It’s what little kids do when they are caught doing something bad. Young children are supposed to behave that way and then, over time, we teach them how to be better. Under the tutelage of the fool in the White House, for well over a decade, Republican cowards in the Senate have learned to function as adult toddlers, completely beholden this ignorant vulgarian.

In desperate attempts to make someone other than Trump America’s villain, and to appease whatever is left of their weak-willed consciences, Republican Senators desperately continue to destroy Fauci.

That’s why Dr. Fauci pleaded the Fifth today. He’s done playing games.

After years of arguing with these idiots, after debunking conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory, Fauci simply stopped. In his opening statement he spoke of Senator Rand Paul’s obsession.

He said that Paul has an "obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution."

Then, Fauci suggested that there was no point in trying to reason with the unreasonable. No matter what he says, the crazies will twist, distort and contort his words into something that irrationally validates their conspiracy theories.

“The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, quote, behind bars, unquote," Fauci said.

At times, Senate Republicans appeared visibly frustrated. That wanted yelling. They wanted screaming, chaos and fireworks. That didn’t happen. You can’t get into a screaming match with someone who won’t scream.

Fauci calmly repeated the same sentence, over and over, throughout the entire hearing. Its wasn’t that obviously guilty, typically nervous Fifth Amendment performance that we’re accoustomed to seeing. It was a clam, almost sarcastic, performance. It’s was as much an FU to Rand Paul as it was a mockery of an unserious, unintentionally transparent Kangaroo Court.

But don’t worry. Trump will try to give Senate Republicans something. He has to. His relationship with them is transactional, and he has to continuously purchase their loyalty.

In the days to come, expect the Department of Justice to announce a new criminal investigation as well as some type of harebrained effort to undo Fauci’s pardon. Also, look for Trump to start babbling on again about Biden and the autopen.