Is Rand Paul The Tar Baby?

I’m not sure Fauci gets that every encounter he has with Rand Paul helps Rand. It doesn’t matter if people who believe Fauci think he pwned Rand; it matters that people who are culturally invested in hating Fauci saw Paul mix it up with him. He’s their Emmanuel Goldstein.

— EtTu,Brady?Hat (@Popehat) July 20, 2021

True, people inclined to believe Rand Paul are disinlined to listen to anything Anthony Fauci says.  

Still, the Senator accused Dr. Fauci of lying to Congress.  What Rand Paul understands about the law or stautory interpretation (or criminal prosecution, for that matter) can be written on a postage stamp with a Marks-A-Lot*.  But does Dr. Fauci do himself harm by responding to the Senator's slander per se (which is technically what occurred)?

Yeah, I don't think so.

For the first part, Fauci doesn't go looking for these confrontations with Paul, and he usually acquits himself in them by being the voice of reason and the grown-up (there is a difference between "grown-up" and "adult," as these exchanges usually illustrate) in the room.  With Paul going after Fauci personally and accusing him of lies by obfuscating (which Paul accused Fauci of doing) and "dancing around" the issue (again, Paul's words to Fauci; guilty dog barks loudest, and usually blames the other for what he is actually doing), Fauci was within his "gentleman's rights" to respond.

And he responded, as a gentleman.  This wasn't the language of "at long last, sir, have you no shame?", but it's to the same effect.  Fauci vigorously defended his integrity and his knowledge against Paul's ignorance and slanders.  Are these things good, or bad?  Well, bad if you think Fauci is trying to turn the tables on Paul.  You can't shame a whore, and you can't squash a bad idea like a bug.  Paul trades in bad ideas, and as we've had occassion more than once to point out here, bad ideas are bulletproof.  But that doesn't mean you have to tacitly accept the actions of the shooter.

Fauci responded to slanders against him.  Do Paul's acolytes hear the slander?  Or do they merely hear Paul's ignorance and see his dance?  The former, obviously; but it is not Dr. Fauci's burden to correc their thinking.  His only obligation, in the end, is to defend himself and insist on what he knows to be the truth. Fauci decried Paul's ignorance in very specific terms:  what Paul insisted had happened was "molecularly impossible."  In other words Paul might as well have been discussing transmuting lead into gold.  Fauci went further: he pointed out that the only liar in this discussion was Senator Paul.

I, for one, found the exchange enlightening.  If Fauci were to decide he was a new career as the identifier of liars, yes, that would be a problem.  Then he would be seeking encounters in order to reprise this moment.  But Fauci has never done that, and I don't expect him to start doing it now.  Therein lies his credibility:  he held his fire, his righteous indignation, his just frustration with fools who will be and always remain fools ("You can't fix stupid"), until holding was no longer an option.  When a man calls you a liar to your face, you're really better off denouncing his lies than letting him continue.

It won't stop his lies; it will buttress your credibility.  In the end, that's all Dr. Fauci has; and he knows it.

(which makes it a good place to drop this one in:

[Sen. Roger] Marshall began by holding up a 3-D printing of the COVID-19 spike protein, which he admitted "baffles me in so many ways."

Says so much about what follows:

Marshall then asked Fauci whether he agreed with a statement by Dr. David Baltimore, who called a specific characteristic of COVID-19 "the smoking gun for the origin of the virus" that makes "a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin."

"Dr. Baltimore, who's an extremely accomplished scientist, has backtracked on that statement, and said 'I wish I had not used the phrase smoking gun,' when it was pointed out to him that actually this is seen in a number of coronaviruses, including one of the common cold coronaviruses," Fauci responded.

"So you disagree with him?" Marshall asked.

"Well, I agree with his second statement, where he backtracked," Fauci said.

"So you disagree with his first statement," Marshall asked again. 

"And he disagrees with his first statement," Fauci responded.

"OK, he's not going to answer the question," Marshall said, before moving on to a discussion about the "S-1 sub-unit of the spike protein."

Yeah, you gotta love that one.

"I think you'll agree that the NIH funded research that led to an S-1 spike that looks very similar if not exactly like what's on the COVID 19 spike," Marshall said, reading directly from prepared notes.

"What are you referring to? Can you please be more specific?" Fauci said. "Are you talking about an experiment? Are you taking about a paper that was published?"

"I'm talking about viral research that was done using NIH funding that developed this S-1 subunit spike that looks exactly like what we have on the COVID-19 spike," Marshall said, calling it "basically the development of the key to the door, that took the original SARS and made it so it would bond to human lung cells."

"Would you agree that the spike that was developed there is also what's on COVID-19?" Marshall asked.

"That's irrelevant to anything until you have a context into which you're putting it," Fauci reiterated.

"Would you agree or disagree that it's the same spike?" Marshall said. 

"I'm not sure what you're' talking about senator," Fauci responded. "I'm really not sure what you're talking about."

Oddly, neither is the Senator.  Wonder if that exchange changed any minds among the Senator's constituents?)

*Am I dangerously dating myself with that metaphor?