What's the Matter with Kongress?

Oppositional Defiance Disorder:  DSM definition

A. A pattern of angry/irritable mood, argumentative/defiant behavior, or vindictiveness lasting at least 6 months as evidenced by at least four symptoms of the following categories, and exhibited during interaction with at least one individual who is not a sibling:
Angry/Irritable Mood

1.

Often loses temper

2.

Is often touchy or easily annoyed

3.

Is often angry and resentful

Argumentative/Defiant Behavior

4.

Often argues with authority figures or, for children and adolescents, with adults

5.

Often actively defies or refuses to comply with requests from authority figures or with rules

6.

Often deliberately annoys others

7.

Often blames others for his or her mistakes or misbehavior

Vindictiveness

8.

Has been spiteful or vindictive at least twice within the past 6 months.

From the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

Watching Congressional hearings on youtube, once you get past the idea of you are watching reality TV or some other form on entertainment, and you realize you are watching what is supposed to be an actual living institution, which most people once assumed had actual work to do, you become quickly disoriented.

Lauren Boebert won her primary in Colorado yesterday, beating four other candidates, so she's doing her job-- namely to get re elected. 

And there seems little doubt Marjorie Taylor Greene will be re elected. 

Ms. Greene has been seen bending over to shout invective through the mail slot into the office of Representative Alexandra Ocasio Cortez. She has yelled out during the Presidential State of the Union address, hissed at Dr. Anthony Fauci that he is no doctor as long as she had the floor in the Congressional hearing, that he is a criminal and should be in prison because his type of science means torturting puppies. Beyond her assertion that Western forest fires are started by Jewish space lasers devised by the Jew George Soros, her insistent polemics against science and virtually any authority of any sort--beyond perhaps, the Protestant ministry--is loud, foul and beyond hyperbolic.

I first became aware of "Oppositional Defiance Disorder" watching "The Wire" in which certain children were pulled out of the classroom because they were so disruptive they made it impossible for anyone else to learn math, science or anything. Now Ms. Greene and Ms. Boebert are doing the same thing but in Congress.

Which, apparently, is what their constituents have sent them to Congress to do.

Which suggests, there may be entire Congressional districts populated by people with this disorder.  Which should, of course, come as no surprise in the Georgia from which Ms. Greene hails, which was, after all the springboard from which "Gone With the Wind" was launched, and which also launched the Ku Klux Klan, which GWTW lionized. (Read the book someday, as opposed to watching the movie, which was bad enough, but not nearly as bizarre as Margaret Mitchell's original text.)

In fact, oppositional defiant disorder is what the Confederacy was all about, when you think about it.

The problem for America today is that the Confederacy of Dunces today is not as Lincoln observed in 1865, geographically limited. As Lincoln noted, the peculiar institution of slavery was not evenly distributed, but confined mainly to the Southern part of the country. But today, every state, from Maine to Wisconsin to California is divided between the urban centers and the rural areas--the old "Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and Alabama in between," phenomenon. 

Once, proper people were raised to respect the idea of martialing evidence to support argument, to examining the sources of information to assess their accuracy and credibility, to critically evaluate any claim in an argument.

But how does a proper person, raised and educated, know how to respond to an  MTG, a Boebert, a Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) when they start ranting about space lasers and the importance of having a good guy with a gun in every classroom, or the conspiracy to strip Americans of their liberty by trying to vaccinate them?

The educated folks have no tools to contain these disruptors. Donald Trump, of course, will never stop talking during a debate, will obey no rules about giving his opponent the opportunity to speak and reply.

How do you debate a raving lunatic?

Disruption is, in fact, their argument. 

And if Trump's oppositional defiance resonates with 40% of American voters, that may be enough to carry the day, to win the 2024 election.  Hitler, of course, came to power with around 30% with the same program. His SA goons roamed the streets with cudgels and policy meant nothing. All the Nazis needed were slogans and grievance, and that is where we are today with Trumpists.

It all comes down to counting: Are there more of us or more of them? 

In a way, there is a point to election denial: We, as individuals have no way to really know if 82 million voters voted for Biden to 74 million for Trump. The whole proposition of an election on such a vast scale is beyond any individual. We take a certain amount, maybe a lot, on faith. We watch the returns on TV but how do we really know whether what we see on TV is real? Did those guys we saw on TV bouncing around on the moon really reach the moon or was it all staged in a studio? 

How do we know?

It's like those excruciating philosophy classes in college: How do we know we are sitting in this room? What is a "fact"? How do I know you are real? 

On the cancer wards, I often had the feeling I had finally faced undeniable reality, because what I was seeing nobody could have made up, nobody could deny. It was beyond mischief, beyond imagination. And so you knew there was really a reality.

Watch the faces of those morons marching through the Capitol on January 6: most of them seemed astonished. We are actually here! This is real! They had to know, on some level, that Trump lost the election, that all their chanting was just a game like the video games they played in the basements of their parents' homes. 

They had to know that simply believing does not make things come true. 

But they will smear their feces on the marble walls, and act out until somebody makes them stop.

The child who expresses himself with feces is revealing a mental disorder beyond the usual pout and tantrum. The kid who places his poop in his dresser drawer or wipes it on the wall of the kitchen is beyond simple rebelliousness.

And, in the Red States at least, in the red counties, you've got a fair number of these folks. I was struck, when, after eight years, I moved out of New York City to rural Rhode Island how very different the people were. In the line at the post office, at the grocery store, at the hardware store and in the diners: these people were really impaired, visibly, palpably. They could not have lasted a day in New York City. They were way beyond Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy. 

I looked around and thought: "This, right here,  is America. 

God help us."

 

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.