Anthony fauci

Listening to the testy exchange between Sen. Rand Paul and St — er, Dr Anthony Fauci the other day, I couldn’t help but think both of these famous lines from Sir Walter Scott’s ‘Marmion’: ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive!’ ...and also this excellent ‘completion’ by J.R. Pope (‘A Word of Encouragement’): ‘But when we’ve practiced for a while, How vastly we improve our style!’ Sen. Paul began by reminding the ubiquitous doctor of Section 1001 of the US Criminal Code, which makes it a felony, carrying a prison term of up to five years, for lying to Congress.

For four years the mainstream media kept a tally of every lie President Trump ever told. Fact-checkers like the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler and CNN’s Daniel Dale centered their lives around Well Ackchyually-ing Trump at every opportunity. How times have changed! President Biden’s lies are constantly written off as either harmless gaffes or exaggerations. Even the most blatant falsehoods from Joe receive little or no criticism from the press. Instead, journalists speculate on what they think the 78-year-old probably meant to say. During the Trump administration, fact-checking hubs like Snopes and Reuters had no problem issuing black and white verdicts on the president’s statements. Suddenly there are 46 shades of gray.

Cockburn’s nieces have just bundled into the kitchen, squealing about someone called Olivia Rodrigo visiting the White House tomorrow. A cursory Google search informed him that Olivia Rodrigo is the star of something called High School Musical: The Musical: The Series and the teen pop sensation behind the ungrammatical chart-topping singles 'drivers license' and 'good 4 u'. Rodrigo, 18, is heading to Washington to meet with President Biden, 78, and Dr Anthony Fauci, 80. According to a White House official, the singer will 'record videos about the importance of young people getting vaccinated, including answering important questions young people have about getting vaccinated’. good 4 her!

Dr Anthony Fauci has exhibited plenty of behavioral red flags over the past year. Don’t believe me? Google ‘Fauci magazine covers’. The results say it all. My favorite was an InStyle cover from last July where the ‘The Good Doctor’ was posing by a pool. The Daily Beast described the cover in slobbering detail: ‘His black rimmed square sunglasses reflect a sun ray back into the camera’s eye. His blue and white button-up is undone at the neck and his jeans fit tight. It’s as if Fauci is playing Daniel Craig playing Roger Stone in an inevitable biopic.’ Can we get a wellness check on these writers, who are drooling over an elderly bureaucrat sitting in a folding chair wearing Dwight Schrute-style sunglasses?

The coronavirus pandemic was a black-swan event the likes of which this planet hadn’t seen in almost a hundred years. It caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and crashed the global economy, resulting in the largest socioeconomic change since 2008. It was, in short, not good. Yet there are pockets of public health experts and corporate media pundits who seem content to play out an endless cycle of pandemic porn. This runs contrary to what the majority of the population wants to watch and how most Americans are choosing to live their lives.

There are lots of libertarians at the end of a pandemic — and for good reason. For more than a year now Americans have watched the actions of dysfunctional government officials play out like the worst reality show of all time. If the ineptitude wasn’t so infuriating, it might make for entertaining TV. There was the episode when the smug governor who asked his constituents to stay home got caught dining at French Laundry. Or what about the one when the White House coronavirus response coordinator broke her own travel restrictions to winterize her vacation home — and got ratted out by members of her own family? The past 12 months have showcased non-stop hypocrisy from our federal and local officials.

One of my favorite photos of all time comes from a 2012 March Madness basketball game that then-president Barack Obama attended with then-British prime minister David Cameron. The picture captures the two men perfectly. It shows Obama sitting courtside with a hot dog in his hand pointing and lecturing in that quintessential Obama way, while Cameron glowers and appears to contemplate all the places he’d rather be — getting an endoscopy, bombing Libya, anywhere else on the planet, really. The question inherent in that photo isn’t why Obama appeared to be hectoring a European ally: Obama would have hectored the Dalai Lama if given the chance. The question is: what was the most powerful leader on earth doing at a Mississippi Valley State basketball game in the first place?

Brandon Lewis - Our position on free school meals 'is the right one' Manchester United footballer Marcus Rashford's campaign to extend the provision of free school meals over the school holidays has seen the government facing considerable criticism, with Labour forcing a vote on the issue in the House of Commons last Wednesday, which was defeated by 61 votes. A rift has even developed within the Conservative party itself, with Robert Halfon, chair of the Education Select Committee, writing in the Spectator on the conservative case for the extension. Sophy Ridge asked the Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis why the government was holding out against the campaign: https://twitter.com/RidgeOnSunday/status/1320299437730746370?

‘Trust the experts’ is the battle cry of America’s elitists. After President Trump’s shock election in 2016 showed that Americans are sick of hearing from politicians, the politicized classes adopted experts as their proxy for power. Climate change ‘experts’ justify AOC’s radical Green New Deal with prophecies of planetary extinction. Foreign policy ‘experts’ claim America will destabilize the Middle East if, as Trump wants, we withdraw troops from Syria and Afghanistan. Medical ‘experts’ are wheeled out to justify increasing control over the lives of everyday Americans through draconian lockdowns, mask mandates and stringent travel restrictions.

Here we go again. President Trump has announced a big healthcare proposal that amounts to none at all. If anything, it will have a positively insalubrious effect upon the health of Americans.On Thursday Trump declared, ‘The historic action I'm taking today includes the first-ever executive order to affirm it is the official policy of the United States government to protect patients with pre-existing conditions. This is affirmed, signed, and done so we can put that to rest.’Umm, no. The fact is that Trump can’t simply issue a healthcare ukase and expect that it will have any practical effect. He can’t force insurers to provide coverage unless he wants to nationalize them.

Donald Trump is moving toward a Swedish model. His vitality sustained by regular doses of hydroxychloroquine, President Prophylaxis is pushing hard for re-entry. His goal? Normality or, this being the Trump presidency, the next best thing. And that, as Trump so succinctly put it, means ‘a lot of death’.Our future is Swedish. Not naked saunas and reindeer stew, but the Swedish model: herd immunity against COVID-19. The Swedes went their own way when, as in Ingmar Bergman’s chucklefest The Seventh Seal, the plague swept up from the south. Being hardy northerners, they pursued their own corona-strategy and continued to live as normally as possible.

More and more people, I suspect, are padding about muttering lines from Psalm 13: 'How long, O Lord,...How long must I take counsel in my soul/ and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?' These are good questions. As of April 9, 2020, however, we do not have a reliable answer. You might think that the reason we don’t have an answer to these questions is because we don’t really know the insidious strength of the enemy, the new coronavirus that, with the help of the Chinese back in December and January, has made its way around the world, sickening hundreds of thousands, from Prime Minister Boris Johnson on down. I think that is only part of the answer.