Ayn Rand vs Tony Fauci: How the World Works

 For him, lofty motives were infinitely less powerful , less trustworthy, less useful, than pure ones. Science was too difficult for people to engage in solely because...they wanted to help rid man of the burden of disease...They did it because they were absolutely certain it could be done and to prove to themselves and the world that they could do it first. They did it to bash their competitors, to think themselves divine, to win and to avoid the terrible, deathly anguish of losing. Backbreaking science and unblemished greed and raw fear, not moral correctness, would conquer AIDS. Boger was absolutely sure of that. He wanted to control it.--

Barry Werth, "The Billion Dollar Molecule"

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci

Reading Barry Werth's account of the Vertex corporation, a start up biotech company of the 1990's, and Tony Fauci's "On Call" simultaneously on my Kindle, going back and forth between the two is like tumbling back and forth between the hot sauna and rolling outside in the snow. Two entirely different sensations, but a singular experience.

Joshua Boger

Joshua Boger, who founded Vertex had the idea that drugs should and could be developed by knowing each atom and the structure, which includes its intricate folding, and using the known properties of the structure of molecules in biologic systems to design drugs. 

One of the revelations of "The Billion Dollar Molecule," is the fact that most big drug companies find their drugs by shifting through soils and dust and other natural sources for molecules which they then purify and test for effects in living creatures. They do not build molecules atom by atom into structures they know will find receptors in viruses or human cells.

On some level, I knew that, as I was familiar with a drug called "Byetta" which was derived from Gila monster saliva, used to treat diabetes back in the late 1990's, which proved to be the great grandfather of the current blockbuster drugs, the GLP1 agonists, which include Ozempic and Zepbound.

Reading about the frenzy, the insanely long hours worked in the labs by Vertex's chemists, it was striking how similar it was to the crazy hours and tribulations medical interns of my era suffered. But the hours were imposed on the Vertex chemists not so much because this was the only way to do these experiments, but by competition imposed by Wall Street, the marketplace and money concerns.

I was introduced the "The Billion Dollar Molecule" at the last  Endocrine Society meetings in Boston, by a chemist who showed a slide of the dust jacket, saying, if you want to know how drugs and Big Pharma actually work, read this book. It was the only time I've ever heard such a recommendation at a Society meeting, where the references are to refereed journals in small font.

Reading Dr. Anthony "Tony" Fauci's memoir, "On Call," is going from snow to sauna, or from the dark side of the moon to the bright side. I cannot say I am a friend of Dr. Fauci's, but I did know him as a third year medical student when he was Chief Resident in Medicine at the Cornell New York Hospital. He is 6 years old than I am and he graduated from Cornell University Medical College 7 years before me, and clearly the ethos of that place, as it existed in those antediluvian times clearly was burned into the man, like the college seals burned into the wooden backs of the chairs they sent out to graduates of their training programs.

Clearly, Tony Fauci is a hero worshiper and he wished to be a hero like the baseball heroes of his Brooklyn days. I lost count of the standing ovations he mentions and the celebrities he met at the White House (Bo Derek, a real 10!) and Bono and other famous stars. What is lost on the page, which may be retrieved in the audio book version, if he read it himself, is the inflection of wonder I heard when interviewing him years later in his office at the NIH, and when I encountered him at various parties and events around Washington.

When he tells you he was first in his class at Cornell University Medical College or how he got into Regis High School by scoring high on the entrance exam, there is an intimation of wonder, as if, "I hit that home run--can you believe it?"

Nobody he admires is mentioned without an attached, "world renown" or "widely respected" and brand name schools are part of what dazzles Dr. Fauci. His own college, Holy Cross had "one of the most respected premedical curricula in the country," and people are foremost or highly regarded. For Dr. Fauci, there is much which is sacred and celebrated. And that clearly provokes his detractors--Marjorie Taylor Greene instinctively knows she wants to undermine the whole notion of "respect" when it comes to "Mr. Fauci, because you're no doctor to me!" Fauci is an establishmentarian and the MAGA crowd are antiestablishmentarians. 

And that drive of the five foot-seven inch boy with something to prove has never dimmed. He recounts how he donned the full space suit to be in the patient's room when NIH got its first Ebola patient. Fauci says he would never ask his troops to do something he would not do, and so there he was, leading from the front, like Captain Dick Winters in "The Band of Brothers."  

There is a certain element of Teddy Roosevelt in all this. The charge up San Juan Hill in a space suit. But, as was said of Teddy Roosevelt: You must always remember Teddy remains six years old.

Of course, Colonel Sink restrains Captain Winters from leading the charge. Presumably, there is a reason we now believe important senior officers should not be lost to enemy action. We learned that much during the Civil War.

And yes, we hear a lot about Fauci running marathons and hiking along the canal along the Potomac River. 

I can attest to the fact Fauci was in terrific physical condition well into his 50's at least: One morning, he flashed by me along the bicycle path on Macarthur Boulevard, shirtless, pumping away on his racing bicycle headed out toward Potomac, Maryland. He was lean, well muscled and flying. So whatever you may say about "short man syndrome" it served him well.

What can sound like relentless, interminable bragging sounds a little different to the ear of a CUMC alum, who heard the same stuff about dedicating yourself to the patient first, the importance of self sacrifice in medical practice, and all the rest,  daily for years back then and the rest-- which means you are up at 2 AM, by the bedside, even if you do not have much more to offer than making sure the IV is working and the respirator settings are good. You remain visible and present. 

For Tony Fauci appearing on all those TV shows, becoming really famous is justified not as self aggrandizement but as part of his job, to be the face of public health, to inform the public, to reassure and to educate. It's not about Fauci, personally, it's about the patient, about medicine and the health of the nation.

At Harvard nowadays, medical students are sent home at 10 PM so they can study for their quizzes and get enough sleep. I can only imagine what Dr. Fauci would say about that. I do know that hanging out on the wards, I learned far more and also different, more valuable and lasting stuff than I could possibly have learned from textbooks or journal articles which quickly went out of date. But what you saw on the wards happening to patients was learning which never expires. The Harvard, and certainly the Yale medical students I encountered in my time around these folks were smart in some ways, but were not doctors in the sense I knew doctors, or the way Fauci sees doctors--they always put number one ahead of everything else. They had to get A's on their quizzes, after all. Tony Fauci would say, "Sure, you need A's but you also need to stay up all night."

And, of course, there are some people you simply have to love because of the enemies they earn: And Dr. Fauci's account of Peter Navarro, who believed himself to be an expert in epidemiology and public health because he had a Ph.D. (in economics), who throws articles from Storm Front, the National Inquirer and the Wall Street Journal at Fauci which "prove" masks, quarantine and vaccines do not work, is just one of the odious cast to surface. There is, of course, Jim Jordan who berates Dr. Fauci for closing down schools and sports venues, thereby denying Americans of their "freedom," and, who can forget Marjorie Taylor Greene, much as we would like to? 

My personal favorite did not make "On Call"--Brandon Fellows, a recently released ex-con who was imprisoned for 3 years for his attempt to overthrown the government on January 6, who mugged behind Dr. Fauci at a recent Congressional hearing, looking like that six year old son of Republican Rep John Rose (R-TN). Apparently this is all the GOP has to offer now.

In "Billion Dollar Molecule," Barry Werth reveals a culture at Vertex flowing down from Joshua Boger of enlightened selfishness--working hard to get rich and to win, and that brought progress in drugs to treat AIDS. 

But Fauci is not primarily driven by money--he made among the highest salary in the federal government, but that was in the range of $400,000, not the millions the board members of Vertex or the guys at Goldman Saks make. And Fauci and his band of brothers also made progress in drugs for AIDS, motivated not by personal enrichment but by a personal connection with the suffering of the patients he admitted to the Clinical Center at NIH and to the gay community who he listened to.

Fauci is no less driven for personal reward. He is not operating on selfless altruism which Boger so dismisses with Ayn Rand contempt.

Fauci gets his reward from pursuing a heroic status; he sees himself charging up the San Juan Hill of AIDS, COVID, Zika virus and Ebola. But this does not rob the public or the individual patient of the benefits of his efforts. 

Superman is no less heroic because he enjoys saving the day.

There is a story I asked Fauci about which persists at Cornell: The day he completed his Chief Residency, Fauci was ushered into the Department of Internal Medicine conference room, where the photos of every Chief Resident adorned the walls, and he was handed his certificate and his appointment to the faculty and staff of Cornell University Medical Center, which meant he could, as Chief Residents always did, open up his office on Park Avenue and go forth and live a rich and rewarding life of comfort and ease. Fauci said thanks but no thanks, to the stupefaction and dismay of the assembled dignitaries. A friend chased him down after the meeting and asked him, "Tony! How could you?"

And Tony reportedly said, "Someday, I'm going to be either very rich or very famous. But if I stay at Cornell, I'm going to be neither."

When I asked Fauci about his story, he flicked me one of his faint, economical smiles and said, "Well, they tell a lot of stories about me back at Cornell."

So I don't know if this story is true or not, but in a very real sense it is true to the perception about Dr. Fauci that being famous is important to him, in part because it is a part of his own story about himself, the little man who came from the most humble of circumstances, who grew up in a small apartment above his father's modest pharmacy, and wound up riding around in Presidential limousines and chatting up movie stars (Bo Derek!) and fighting off monsters like Ebola virus in a space suit. 

But if that is his reward for all the hard, often frantic, demanding work he does, we all benefit from that. And we don't have to wait for a big company to make its money back before the patients get to benefit. If university folk or government servants can get their rewards from tenure or feeling heroic rather than from stock options, can that not drive the common good? 

The platform for the COVID vaccine, after all, was achieved not by start up Wall Street backed companies, but by one very disparaged university faculty member (Katalin Kariko) who the University of Pennsylvania kept trying to fire, who they so marginalized she had a broom closet for an office, and her colleague (Drew Weissman, who Dr. Fauci says he "trained"), who managed to accommodate her while keeping his own job as the University of Pennsylvania tried to disown them,  until they both got the Nobel prize for medicine at which point Penn claimed all the glory.

Great advances in drug therapy and in public health do not necessarily have to come from people being driven by greed, and promises of stock options.

In the case of the system Josh Boger argues for, the drug when it does emerge is tantalizingly attractive, but unavailable to help patients who want and need it now because the system which functions for profit cares nothing for patients. 

In my own clinic, less than 20% of patients who need Ozempic, Mounjaro or Zepbound can afford them. I have to tell 80% of my patients, "Well, we have a family of drugs now that works exceptionally well. You could normalize your blood sugars, lose 80 pounds over the next nine months, safely, but it will cost you $800 a month, if you're lucky, out of pocket. Some of the weight loss may occur because you'll no longer be able to afford groceries."

Even if the patient jumped for that bargain, most of my patient's don't have $800 a month. They'd be homeless.

When Eli Lilly spoke with Frederick Banting and Charles Best about the process of getting a patent on insulin they sold their rights to insulin for $1, because they had a ward full of kids dying from type 1 diabetes. That was 1922. They had "discovered" insulin.  They had spent a summer sweating away in a lab on the top of a hospital in Toronto, killing dogs, but finally identifying that single agent the pancreas makes which lowers blood sugar: insulin. They did not form a new company to capitalize on their discovery--they acted to get insulin produced at scale as quickly as possible to save a ward full of dying kids at their Toronto hospital. 

Banting and Best and friend

They did not need money to motivate their long hours and arduous efforts.

Can't imagine Joshua Boger doing that. 

I can imagine Tony Fauci doing that. 

God and Man at the Supreme Court

 

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

--Voltaire 

One reason we need our Supreme Court justices to wear black robes and to have a ritual at the Court on 1st Street in Washington, D.C. is we need to have an unimpeachable power, like God, to give a final judgement. So the sessions begin with "Oyez! Oyez! All persons having business before the Supreme Court of the United States, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting. God save the United States and this Honorable Court!"

The trouble with a republic, with a government of the people, by the people, for the people is that the people are fractious and argue all the time, and often simply will never accept they are wrong about anything, so you have to have somebody who will settle things and end all the contention. So we really like the finality, the omniscience of a court.

 Unless, of course, you are Donald Trump, in which case you rage against those who judge you, unless they adore you.

But the rest of us submit, and we like it, as the parishioners in a Catholic Church enjoy submitting. 

It makes us feel there is a power in the universe which controls fates according to impartial laws, and a place where the good guys win and the bad guys punished.

Until you discover one justice who has been given a home for his mother and a mobile vacation home for himself, and another who believes he is anointed to bring godliness to the nation and four others who will vote to allow bump stocks to convert rifles into machine guns so you can shoot 58 people in a few seconds, if you decide God has told you to do so.

And your justices can declare that separation of church and state is unconstitutional now, and that no precedent in law matters any more, that thing called stare decisis is a dead letter, so that every prior decision is no longer safe--same sex marriage, inter racial marriage, abortion, contraception are now on the docket, as Justice Thomas said in his Dobbs opinion, where he invited cases about these issues to be brought before the Court because he intended to reverse those erroneous decisions of the past.

Thomas might entertain revisiting Brown v Board of Education, because, you know, to say that separate but equal is inherently unequal, is just so 20th century.

The thing about Mr. Trump and judges is that he is such a bomb thrower the whole bowing and scraping thing to judges just gets exploded along with all the rituals of respect for authority figures--that's called "draining the swamp," you see--and if Mr. Trump dropped his trousers and mooned the judge, his fans would squeal with delight. 

There is about as much chance we will ever fix our judges and judicial system as we will ever kill the Electoral College. 

The arguments against "packing the Court" or using some other mechanism to replace the justices who are currently ensconced come down to two:

1. A Court of fixed, lifetime justices provides stability, to anchor the country in a stormy sea, where political passions shift in four year cycles. It provides predictability so businesses and individuals can plan ahead years and decades, a rock, a North Star, in a tempestuous sea of ever changing political passions. 

The trouble with this Court as an anchor idea is that the Court clearly has, at least since it became a Trump Court, and even before, not been an anchor immune to the shifting tides and passions of political opinion. The Dobbs decision was a political decision: Trump said he'd pack the Court to overturn Roe and he did and they did the job they were appointed to do. And in doing so, Justice Thomas, in his opinion, clearly said it would not end with Dobbs, as he looked at the cases legalizing gay marriage and even contraception, based on an implied finding of a right to privacy, and he invited new cases so he could rule against these things. That is not an anchor, not continuity, but revolution. 

This current Court, with Thomas leading the way, calls for undoing generations of decisions which the Federalist Society and the National Rifle Association and the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan have hated: decisions regarding laws attempting to regulate gun ownership and use, carrying and firepower, decisions about whether consenting adults can have sex with whomever they wish, decisions about whether separation of church and state is a guaranteed principle, a First amendment right, or an anathema and unconstitutional. This Court is not an institution of stability but an instrument of political will coming from the far right. 

And so that makes the Court ultimately not just political, but the most political of all our branches of government. It tells us what we cannot vote on, what the rule will be. So when Roy Cohn provided Donald Trump with his fundamental concept: "Don't tell me about the Law; tell me about the Judge," that was a fundamental insight.

2. Packing the Court would mean that the Court could grow to an unwieldy number, unless some justices were ejected, and Court packing certainly would acknowledge that the Court is a institution driven not by "the law" but by partisan politics.

There are two answers to this: 

a/ Some supreme courts in Europe have 150 justices and they function quite well, thank you. So size is not in and of itself, a problem. But if you like the Court to stay at 9 justices, then you can rotate out some of them and rotate in new justices, at least according to Bernie Sanders. The Constitution only says the justices shall serve for life, but it does not say they have to serve on the Supreme Court; they can be rotated back to the lower courts in the federal judiciary, and apparently that was once the practice.

b/ The Court has already, for all practical purposes already been packed.

Mitch McConnell did that, when President Obama nominated Merrick Garland for SCOTUS, McConnell simply said, "No," and when Trump assumed office, McConnell was able to pack the court with a 6-3 super majority. 

Did that not say as baldly as any act that the Court is a political animal?

But we like wearing blinders; we like our dark glasses through which the world is only shadows and we construct images of reality in our mind, not from the evidence we can actually see.

As long as most people can lead their day to day lives, can fill up their pick up trucks with gas, afford their vacation homes and holidays, we are stuck with the system we've got, with judges in black robes who are not just above the law, but who are the law, and a Trump, who like Silvio Berluscone of Italy, will never be punished for breaking any law, and we will have the government and the country we deserve, of the people, by the people, for the people--God save us. 

Felonious Trump: Whose Crooked Now? What is Justice?

 

Occasionally, I have imagined arriving in Heaven and being welcomed at a sort of cocktail party for new arrivals in an event which looked a little like some of the parties thrown by New York publishers I got invited to, decades ago. Scattered about those Manhattan event rooms were people I recognized all brought together in one place:  George Plimpton, Nelson DeMille, Kurt Vonnegut--people you'd expect to see hanging about at a party of literati, but also Carly Simon, the singer, who wound up there because she had written a children's book and was a grand daughter of the Simon of Simon and Shuster, but also the occasional mayor, or ballet dancer. 

But in my imagined welcome party at Heaven, I saw Adolph Hitler, standing there with his Swastika armband, among the other guests, and I thought, "Oh, my, perhaps I did not qualify for Heaven after all, but am in the other place."

The Model Victim

Wannabe

But no, I was assured, I was in Heaven, but so was Adolph. He was just standing there chatting, among the other celebs, all having a pleasant time.

And how would I reconcile those two things?

But then I remembered that passage from that wonderful book I read, as a freshman in college, "The Stranger" in which Meursault, the narrator, who has told you the story of how he, inexplicably,  shot to death an Arab youth on a beach, and who now tells you, immaculately detached, about his trial and the witnesses who come forth to describe how utterly unfeeling he seemed at the funeral of his mother, and Meursault says, likely accurately, that he got the impression he was being judged not for having fatally shot the Arab youth, but for not having cried at the funeral of his mother.  

Listening to Accusations

He was being judge for being alienated from human affection.

And he marvels at the parade of witness who describe him from different parts of his humdrum life, each from his own perspective, relating a scene with Meursault they remember in some detail, as the prosecution systematically builds its case against him as an inhuman, remorseless killer, and Meursault observes the experience engenders even more detachment, as the person they are describing is completely unrecognizable to him, as the picture which emerges is not of him, but a picture of someone he does not know at all, who is on trial, not for a murder on a beach but for being a monster.

Of course, we know Meursault as readers, and we know the scenes described are accurate in one sense, but we know Meursault is not so much unfeeling, as scrupulously honest; he simply refuses to profess feelings he does not really embrace. He would never say, as most of us do, "Oh, I'm so sorry for your loss," when, in fact, we are not really saddened, but we know we have to act out our parts as the sympathetic human beings we are not.

In Meursault's case, his mother has died at an inconvenient time.  The fact is, she had lived apart from him in a nursing home and it is likely she had never much missed him nor him her. They had "grown apart" we might say in polite society. And now she had died and his employer had to give him the Friday off so he could get to the funeral some distance away, and the employer felt he had to say yes, although clearly he was unsympathetic, but in the end he had to say, "Well, there is no one like a mother." He had to play the role of sympathy society demands, but which Meursault sees as phony.

When Donald Trump went on trial, I have not one iota of doubt he heard testimony against him and he did not think any of it fairly described him. He sees himself as a good man, a champion in fact. He had no idea who that man was who was being described by Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels.

Rauter on Trial

So did Hans Albin Rauter, the SS commandant of the Netherlands, who ruthlessly executed anyone who resisted the German control of that nation, who oversaw the round up and execution of Dutch Jews--the Netherlands, by percentage, purged more Jews than any other European nation falling under Nazi control. (Of 150,000 Dutch Jews only 40,000 survived.)  When Rauter survived an assassination attempt, 500 Dutch were summarily executed in reprisal under his direction. This was standard Third Reich method: Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in Czechoslovakia and whole villages with villagers int them were burned alive.

 And in both cases the SS men felt wholly justified.

Heydrich

Listening to Rauter testify in his trial for war crimes after the war, you learn he considered himself an innocent victim, who was only concerned with maintaining order in the new, exalted society the Reich was creating.

Obadiah Youngblood

In "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," Judith Rossner provides the confession of the man who murdered a woman he had picked up in a bar, who had taken him home to her apartment, had sex with him but then tried to get him to leave her apartment when he had nowhere else to go, being homeless, and so her stabbed her to death, which, as Rossner observes, seems to him a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and in fact anyone in the same position would have done the same, because, after all, he was the victim.

And so it is with that 40% of the American public who loves Trump. Trump is a completely innocent man. He can never be guilty. His trial was a witch hunt and a travesty of justice, a political charade. 

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand was "crooked." But Trump is a straight arrow who says what he thinks whether it is politically correct or not, like Meursault. He is fundamentally, an honest man who says the truth, offensive as it may be, like, for instance, our country is being poisoned by illegal immigrant rapists, insane asylum escapees, who are dark skinned, and who don't speak English.

You never see yourself as guilty. 

MTG and Dr. Anthony Fauci

 

One wonders why Anthony Fauci, MD, who is no longer a federal employee, would consent to testify at a Congressional hearing when he knows  Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan and other Wah Wah Republicans will not actually ask him questions, but will simply use him as a stage prop.

MTG spewed forth a number of complaints:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTSG_xlJvFQ

1/ Science uses dogs in experiments. Beagles (Snoopy) in particular.  She may be unaware it was dogs who were sacrificed to discover insulin in 1922, saving a ward of three hundred Toronto children dying of type 1 diabetes, and very quickly saving thousands then millions of other patients with juvenile diabetes.

Banting and Best discover insulin

2/ MTG expresses withering disdain that Dr. Fauci first questioned the efficacy of masks but then endorsed masking for children and the general population. Fauci, has, of course, said he was skeptical that masks could be effective, but when scientific studies were complete, it was evident they could help reduce spread of infection, so he said then, "Well, I was wrong. They are a useful tool." But for Ms. Greene the mask is a sort of child abuse, comparable to ritual blood sacrifice.  

Obadiah Youngblood New Hampshire Howl

3/ Dr. Fauci is shown in a photo held by Ms. Green as he sits in an empty bleacher section with two people, his mask pulled down below his nose while the other two are masked and the stadium clearly nearly empty. This offense is less clear. Is Ms. Greene saying Fauci was hypocritical in pulling down his mask or in recommending avoiding crowds and then going to a crowdless game? Mad Dog did recognize the woman sitting next to him in the picture--it was Dr. Fauci's wife. That Fauci might unmask while sitting next to his wife, who he lives with, did not strike Mad Dog as a violation of mask protocol. Who the man is, is not clear, but this photo hardly looks like a smoking gun.  Ms. Greene's wah wah seems to be that stadiums were forced to be empty just to prevent spread of a virus which was projected to kill 3 million people but in the end killed only 1 million, because the intervention of Dr. Fauci and those who worked with him.

4/ Ms. Greene rails about NIH scientists collecting $750 million from patents on medicines and other products they developed while employed by the US taxpayer.

Dr. Fauci has said elsewhere he made $125 a year from a patent on a technology for a lab test he developed 25 years before COVID,  but that is not illegal and in fact, he might have added that scientists supported by government grant money not uncommonly set up companies outside their universities to develop and pursue ideas they got while being supported by government grants. 

Fauci is not one of those, but this is a murky part of intellectual property law and Ms. Greene appears to be saying scientists should not profit from their ideas if they are employed by the government. She has not, apparently, read "The Billion Dollar Molecule" which describes how miracle drugs which have changed the fates of millions of patients often start in drug companies or universities, but then are driven by the incentive for profit to be developed outside these places.

5/ MTG represents those resentful, seething folks in Rome, GA, who do not have MD degrees and she refuses to address Dr. Fauci as "doctor" because she knows her constituents love that. Any signifier of respect for a title, anything which confers and recognizes prestige as a result of academic achievement is a red flag waved in the face of her down home folks, who haven't a prayer of ever achieving that title. Oh, so you're a DOCTOR, well let me tell you, we don't respect doctors down round these parts, because we know the doctors torture beagles, make children wear masks in school, develop vaccines which save millions of lives, shake their heads when Donald Trump suggests he has a great idea for ending the COVID pandemic by injecting bleach intravenously, and people like MR Fauci should be thrown in jail for all those horrible things they did to save the nation.

In Georgia, They Love MTG 

Mad Dog remembers Dr. Fauci walking onto a dark ward at two A.M. to talk about a twenty year old woman who was lying in a bed gasping for air. He listened to her heart and then stepped into the hallway and asked the medical student, intern and resident who were standing there trying to figure out what to do for her what they thought her problem was. When they gave their answer, which was wrong, he smiled tolerantly and explained why they were wrong, but he gave them full points for trying, and for holding fast to their post at the bedside and then told them what to do to save her, and then walked off the ward to grab four  hours sleep before Morning Report. 

Dr. Fauci

To Mad Dog's knowledge, Marjorie Taylor Green has never set foot on a ward and saved a patient at 2 AM, or at any more civilized hour, in her entire, brief, ignominious life. Nor has Jim Jordan. Nor have any of the Wah Wah Banana Republicans who argued about "decorum" on that committee, who decided respect was owed not to any witness, but only to other members of Congress.

The New York Hospital Cornell Medical Center

As if any of these Republicans has ever done anything which could have earned them even one iota of the respect owed Dr. Fauci.  

Crooked Donald and the Waah Waah Republicans

D onald Trump convicted on all 34 charges.

How's that for a man who could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and never face justice?

But how did they find a group of 12 New Yorkers which did not contain even a single Trump fan?

In this country, that's remarkable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa4kzo6AHKc

But, as Mr. Trump informed us just after the verdict, this country is now so poisoned by the millions of terrorists, escapees from insane asylums and rapists who have been pouring across the border every day, we shouldn't be surprised at this jury pool, picked from a demographic where only 6% of the citizens are Trump voters.

How many of these were El Salvadoran insane asylum residents just out of custody at the Southern border, transported by Texas Governor Greg Abbott by bus to New York to sit on that Trump jury? That's what I'd like to know.

And why couldn't we get Paul Gosar on that jury? He should have been foreman of the jury. Then we would have got justice. Mr. Gosar, who opposes contraception, at least for white women, who believes in the 2nd amendment and who knows Biden stole the election from Mr. Trump would have injected a much needed dose of reality into that jury. 

Now, if we had had fair jury, say Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Louie Gomert, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh (who may be gone now but is not forgotten), and any of dozens of other upright citizens we all could name--very different outcome.

But no! What we got is a jury from that city of carnage and depredation, that Sodom of Gomorrah, that low intelligence, sleazy urban den of iniquity, New York City, which Donald Trump gave the best years of his life trying to raise up to a standard of virtue. 

So ungrateful!

So Sad!

But you know, the best thing that ever happened to Adolph Shicklgruber Hitler was that 6 months in prison, where he had time to sit down and think and write "Mein Kampf."  It made him a millionaire and it gave him time to try out his material. Donald Trump has just not had a moment's rest since he took that famous ride down the golden escalator. 

So we should all maybe hope he gets that 4 year sentence from the conflicted judge, who is still prickly about Mr. Trump's giving out the judge's daughter's home phone number and her password to Facebook.

You know Mr. Trump will rise, in the end. He's a man of destiny. The Tempest is coming. Stormfront. Stormy. Daniels. You know, he will make sure nobody replaces us. He'll make America Great Again. 

 

FOX NEWS INTERVIEWS MAD DOG

 As some of you may know, Mad Dog has a day job and that is working for Steward Medical Group, which has lately become something of a high profile enterprise: For weeks Steward was above the fold, front page news for the Boston Globe. 

So, it was only a matter of time until Mad Dog would be accosted by a member of the working press, or someone who plays a news person on TV, to wit, a FOX NEWS sprite, who passed her audition on a white leather couch (one can only imagine) and demanded MAD DOG  say something to the public as he tried to enter the clinic door.

FOXY:  Excuse me, do you work here?

MAD DOG:  Until further notice.

FOXY: Excuse me? 

MAD DOG: Already been there.

FOXY: Pardon.

MAD DOG: I excused you already.

FOXY: What can you tell me about working here when the Democrat governor of Massachusetts has called you a criminal enterprise and threatened shut down all Steward facilities?

MAD DOG: A criminal enterprise? Well, now, that is news. To me at least.

FOXY: So how does that affect you as you try to take care of patients?

MAD DOG: Thing is, I really do have patients to take care of right now and I don't want to keep them in the waiting room any longer than necessary. Time is money, you know, and those yachts don't pay for themselves.

FOXY: Are you worried the governor will nationalize Steward, make it into a state run socialized medicine agency?

MAD DOG: She can do that?

FOXY: People are saying...

MAD DOG: Oh, then it must be true. I heard she was going to send in the National Guard to run the clinics, which would be a great help during COVID and flu season, but not so much now. They'd probably get bored and definitely would put a strain on our coffee budget, which is under considerable stress as it is.

FOXY: What was that you said about yachts?

MAD DOG: Oh, they do not pay for themselves. Mobile homes neither, as Justice Thomas can tell you. You would not believe the cost a mobile home, or maybe you call it an RV, one of those Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathons. The upkeep!

FOXY: Pardon?

MAD DOG:  Well, some people are saying it's a mobile home, but I think of it as a land yacht. Either way, very expensive. 

FOXY: I'm not sure I follow.

MAD DOG: Well, it's like Paul Gosar says, "Aren't we supposed to be standing for something instead of falling for everything?"

FOXY (Speaking to her producer through her ear piece) I think we better move on.

MAD DOG: I've really got to get to clinic. You know there's a tuberculosis pandemic.

FOXY: Tuberculosis?

MAD DOG: Paul Gosar was the first to notice. Those illegal aliens brought it in. We could treat it with Ivermectin or chloroquine, but the FDA refuses to allow these life saving medications because big pharmacoindustriomedical complex won't let us!

FOXY: Are there any other doctors working in this clinic I can talk to?

MAD DOG: You'd have to register as a patient.

FOXY: You are signing up new patients?

MAD DOG: We were when I was last here, but that was before the Memorial Day weekend, which was an utter debacle.

FOXY: You had a problem with Memorial Day?

MAD DOG: Not here. At home. The clinic was closed over Memorial Day weekend, but my wife and I nearly came to blows over the flag.

FOXY: The flag?

MAD DOG: She insisted she knew how to fly the flag and that I don't.  Now how do you string that sucker up? Blue part at the bottom or at the top? 

FOXY: And that's a wrap, from Steward Medical clinic in the Merrimack Valley!

On Being An Unwoke Democrat: Of Indians, Pronouns and Transgender Clinics

 I support anybody being the person they want to be and feel they must be. But my question is: To what extent do I have to participate in supporting your self image?

--Dave Chappelle 

Having attended the New Hampshire Democratic Party state convention, having heard the wonderful Jamie Raskin confront, slam and otherwise undo Republicans in particular (Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, Mike Johnson) and in general (Trumpists, Trumplings and other sub genera of Trumpies), I have returned home to Hampton renewed and reinvigorated, determined to say what I'm actually thinking, rather than silently self editing into demure quietude. 

Congressman Jamie Raskin

I'm determined to resist what used to be called "political correctness" and now is called, "wokeness."

One is the pandering, simpering embrace of identity politics, which may flatter a single group but alienates many more. The Cleveland Indians felt compelled to rename their team because "Indians" is now deemed derogatory. I agree with George Carlin that one owes it to a man to call him what he wants to be called: So Muhammed Ali gets to discard his "slave name," and you should call him by the name he chooses. And a group name which is, or has been meant as a slur, like "Kike" or "Nigger" should be abjured, by consensus. 

But insisting on "Native Americans" or "Indigenous People" is simply to insist on a misconception at best and a lie at worst. As George Carlin insisted, everybody is from somewhere else, except maybe the original human beings who walked out of the Rift Valley in Africa. But Native Americans did not simply materialize out of the soil on the Great Plains or anywhere else in North America. They clearly walked or boated to North America from Asia. They got here first, to be sure, maybe by hundreds or even a thousand years, and Europeans washed up later, and then displaced the Indians.

Quanah Parker

There is argument about the derivation of the word, "Indian" which, for years has been taught in history courses as the name Columbus gave the people he found living in the Caribbean, thinking he'd reached India,  but more recently claims have been made Columbus knew full well he had not reached India and the name came from In Deus, (Of God, or people of God).  History, of course, is one long argument, but it doesn't matter. The name was not used by whites to denigrate those who preceded them, as, say "Redskins" might have been said to do.

And to say, "I'm sticking with 'Indians'," is not to deny these stone age people deserved to be systematically murdered or treated savagely. Whether Phil Sheridan really said, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian," the sentiment was the same. Sheridan and Sherman understood to bring the Plains Indians to heel you had to kill all the buffalo, on which these cultures depended, and that the generals did, bringing in hunters and accomplishing a real genocide of animals, reducing a sea of buffalo, millions which covered miles of the vast Great Plains, to near extinction.

Having said all that, I'm sticking with "Indians."

Maga Trump Chump

I also don't like "native species" and "invasive species"  when it comes to plants and wildlife. Everything arrives, tries to successfully occupy a niche and either succeeds or does not.

So, as Democrats, let's not pander to "Indigenous People" and open our conventions with 15 minutes of drumming on tom toms. Let's just say we did them wrong and move on.

As for pronouns, no less than The New Yorker writes its articles using "they" to refer to a person who prefers to use that pronoun. I agree you call a person the name he or she wants to be called, but that applies only to proper nouns, to names, not to pronouns. My pronouns belong to me and so do your pronouns belong to me. I'm owner of what pronouns I use. As Chappelle says, the question is: To what extent must I participate in supporting your self image? Do I have to change a language pattern locked in since infancy, when I first learned to speak English, before I could even know I was learning anything at all? 

And lastly, while I cleave to the idea that every patient be treated with respect, and nobody should be belittled or made to feel badly about his or her sexual preference or gender identity--which is something which should matter only to those individuals, the idea that patients who present themselves to clinics for treatment of their gender dysphoria should be in control of what that treatment should be, without challenge is not just absurd, but it is inimical to the effectiveness of treatment. 

Now that a scholarly, dispassionate review of the experience of treating patients in the United Kingdom has been published by one of that nation's reigning and respected pediatricians, Hilary Cass, MD, is it alright again to ask whether we are doing more harm than good in our efforts to help?

Paul McHugh, MD

These areas of contention: Transgender , Woke acquiescence to demands for pronoun chaos and obsequious abjuration of words like "Indians" are losers for Democrats. 

Not only that, caving in to these misapprehensions is simply to embrace wrong thinking.