There was another hearing on Tuesday, besides the Supreme Court hearing double cases to decide whether or not Donald Trump is a king above the law, or if he has to turn over his taxes and his financials. Over in the Senate, Dr. Anthony Fauci and a few other medical experts from the White House coronavirus team came to tell senators what a shit job Trump is doing, in the nicest language possible . The House wanted them to testify too, but Donald Trump only wants oversight from Republicans ("oversight") so he blocked them from the House.
Senate is fine, though!
Of course, a bunch of the senators and witnesses are in quarantine right now, so not many people were actually present in the hearing room. People phoning in included Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray, the chair and ranking member of the Senate Health Committee, and three of the four witnesses. That's right, the hearing was ZOOM-CHATTIN' WITH THE OLDS, and the point of this post is that Rand Paul is a fucking asshole, so let's get to it.
Rand Paul, self-certified mall optometrist (or something), just did not know where Dr. Fauci GOT OFF acting like he was some kind of so-called "expert" on pandemics. We really felt for Dr. Fauci during all of these exchanges, and wondered how it might have gone if Fauci and Paul hadn't been separated by Zoom, but rather had the benefit of being next door to each other.
Dr. Paul really wants the kids to go back to school, you see, and he, who thought it was FINEJUSTFINE to go breathe on the Senate gym after he was exposed to the novel coronavirus, also thinks it would be FINEJUSTFINE if they just opened up all the schools, because the kids don't even get it!
He explained these and other thoughts from his medical brain to Dr. Fauci:
Fauci smacks down Rand Paul for suggesting children nearly immune from COVID-19 www.youtube.com
Paul, in making his argument for sending the kids back to school to disease-vector all over each other and take it home to grandma, said we need to "observe with an open mind what went on in Sweden." We guess Paul hasn't read much about what went on in Sweden, doesn't know that things there aren't so hot right now, or that the only reason it hasn't been worse there is because they actually started identifying and tracing and testing for the virus long before the US did.
Of course, prolific tweeter Jordan Uhl tweeted out the "Swedish model," in case Rand Paul is confused:
After Paul said the Swedish thing, he launched into this shit, which ended with him saying Dr. Fauci isn't some big hot shit just because he's some kind of so-called Real Doctor. Please observe with an open mind what the senator from LensCrafters is saying:
PAUL: We're opening up a lot of economies around the US and I hope that people who are predicting doom and gloom and saying, 'We can't do this, there's going to be a surge,' will admit that they were wrong if there isn't a surge, because I think that's what's going to happen. In rural states, we never really reached any sort of pandemic levels in Kentucky and other states. [...]
Outside of New England we've had a relatively benign course for this virus nationwide, and I think the one-size-fits-all, that we're going to have a national strategy and nobody's going to go to school, is kind of ridiculous.
The power needs to be dispersed because people make wrong predictions. And really the history of this, when we look back, will be of wrong prediction after wrong prediction after wrong prediction. [...]
I think we ought to have a little bit of humility in our belief that we know what's best for the economy. And as much as I respect you, Dr. Fauci, I don't think you're the end-all, I don't think you're the one person that gets to make a decision. We can listen to your advice, but there are people on the other side saying there's not going to be a surge and that we can safely open the economy.
Fuckin' asshole. Anyway, few bones to pick!
The rural bloodbath is just beginning, and most of the fastest-growing outbreaks in the country now are in rural areas. Of course coronavirus in America started in blue states and cities, because those are the places, by definition, that human beings have a reason to go to. Nobody is taking a business or pleasure trip to South-Central Buttfuck, Kentucky.
Democratic Rep. Don Beyer from Virginia, the state next door, tried to help Dr. Paul with some info about the outbreak in Warren County, where Rand Paul lives:
Warren County, Kentucky – where Rand Paul lives – has more COVID-19 cases per capita than 51 of the 67 counties in… https: //t.co/DPowE2CYhs
— Rep. Don Beyer (@Rep. Don Beyer) 1589300959.0
You betcha, Rand Paul, what a "benign" outbreak of coronavirus is beginning to wash over the heartland!
As far as Rand Paul's shit-ass comments about Dr. Fauci, and his suggestion that all the kids need to go back to school right now to do the Swedish Model, we'll let Dr. Fauci respond himself.
FAUCI: I have never made myself out to be the end-all and only voice in this. I'm a scientist, a physician, and a public health official. I give advice according to the best scientific evidence.
And:
FAUCI: We don't know everything about this virus, and we really better be very careful, particularly when it comes to children. Because the more and more we learn, we're seeing things about what this virus can do that we didn't see from the studies in China or in Europe. For example, right now, children presenting with COVID-19 who actually have a very strange inflammatory syndrome, very similar to Kawasaki syndrome.
Huh, two kids were just diagnosed with coronavirus in Warren County, where Paul lives. Maybe he could have googled and learned that if he wasn't busy having his Aquabuddha head up his own ass.
By the way, Warren County? Rand Paul does not live in a Kentucky metropolis, if you'll recall. It's Bowling Green, a small city that is the capital of the South-Central Buttfuck region of Kentucky, between Louisville and Nashville.
What was that you were saying about the rural pandemic, Senator LensCrafters?
Here is another video of Dr. Rand Paul saying that all the evidence points to people exposed to coronavirus (LIKE HIM!) definitely having immunity. He says it's really awesome that all the meatpacking workers have immunity now (except for the dead ones, we guess!) and can go make him some meat.
Fauci doesn't completely disagree, but he adds some actual science to Dr. Spaceman's ramblings.
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Fauci did tell Senator Patty Murray elsewhere that we have a "moral responsibility" to protect workers in meatpacking plants to the best of our ability, adding that he was saying that both as a doctor, and also just as a human person.
The rest of the hearing was good, at least the Dr. Fauci parts. Science was shared.
Fauci told Bernie Sanders that the coronavirus death toll is "almost certainly" higher than the official count, which is over 80,000 now. Fauci said "most of us" feel deaths are being undercounted. Fauci said the coronavirus isn't going to "just disappear" like Donald Trump always says it will miraculously do.
Fauci told Elizabeth Warren that the outbreak is sort of under control in New York, for the most part, but in "other parts of the country" (RURAL AREAS, RAND PAUL, ARE YOU LISTENING, RAND PAUL?) it is most certainly not.
Oh, and Mitt Romney noted how Donald Trump says everything is Barack Obama's fault, and specifically said it's Obama's fault we don't have a coronavirus vaccine yet. Was that Obama's fault, Dr. Fauci? "No, Senator, not at all," said Dr. Fauci.
Fox News is going to be working extra hard to get Fauci fired after this hearing, you just watch.
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Simon MacCorkindale had spent a couple of years in the US trying to get a role, but just got single episode roles and a single miniseries appearance. So an offer of a starring role in a TV series, no matter how silly, would have seemed a godsend. It did pay off somewhat, as he ended up doing 59 episodes of the nighttime soap Falcon Crest.
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ok there bothsides...we see who's side you're on.