A diary that matched the press conferences would serve no purpose. People keep them to say what they can’t say at the podium, and a man under sustained attack writes down that he thinks his attackers are crazy. The mockery of the fame material is cheap in the same way. Piers Morgan (b. 1965) called him a fame-hungry narcissist, which describes most people who spend forty years climbing to the top of a federal agency and then find themselves on television every night. Vanity in a diary is a weak charge.<\/p>\n
Wanting to be loved is one thing. Saying one thing in private and another in public about a factual question you are the government’s chief authority on is another. Rand Paul (b. 1963) claims the diaries show what Fauci (b. 1940) wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories. Whether they show that is the live question, and it survives even if every word about Jake Tapper and the cameras gets thrown out. James Carville (b. 1944) says the release taught the public nothing and that Fauci was an honest man handling a once-in-a-millennium problem. Those two readings can be tested against the text. The vanity charge can’t be tested against anything, because everyone loses it.<\/p>\n
Two complications for whichever side you land on. The diary sat on HHS servers, so it was never a private notebook in a drawer, and Fauci wrote about the FOIA requests coming at him. He knew the exposure. Against that, he pleaded the Fifth 111 times at the hearing and said the unredacted release was aimed at embarrassing and intimidating him. A man who took the Fifth 111 times has told you something, whatever it is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A diary that matched the press conferences would serve no purpose. People keep them to say what they can’t say at the podium, and a man under sustained attack writes down that he thinks his attackers are crazy. The mockery … Continue reading