Dr. Anthony Fauci on Friday declined a request to appear voluntarily before a second Senate panel after majority Republicans on the Homeland Security Committee voted along partisan lines last week to hold the longtime infectious disease expert in contempt.

In a pointed letter to Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, a lawyer for the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said any effort to compel him to appear before a Senate subcommittee, after a contentious July 29 hearing, would be to "impermissibly harass or degrade Dr. Fauci for political purposes.”

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[–] 127 points 1 month ago (7 children)

When I call my dog, he comes and I kick him, he doesn't come again the second time I call him.

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  • [–] 122 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    This should have been obvious from the moment the fascists invited Zelensky to the white house, and brought him straight into a room to ambush him in-front of the media.

    Everything fascists do is in bad faith. They do not care about the truth or the meaning of words. It's all a performance to disinform and misdirect.

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  • [–] 31 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

    Its sad they think their ambush was any kind of gotcha for the Zell, they embarassed the shit out of themselves.

    I still jokingly ask if someone even said thank you when presented with a basic reasonable inquiry I cant answer or want to ironically/arbitrarily rebuff

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  • [–] 71 points 1 month ago (32 children)

    If I were him (which I'm not), I wouldn't appear before any political panels after what they did to him the first thing. All the panellists want is sound bites to make him look bad.

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  • [–] 44 points 1 month ago (29 children)

    If only it were just sound bites.

    They want to put him in prison because that's what the nutjobs in their base want. They can (and have before) combed through testimony to find any discrepancies to charge people with perjury. They would do the same with Fauci, except Biden granted a pardon to Fauci. But that pardon wouldn't cover any new testimony Fauci gives.

    So their plan was to bring in Fauci, ask him a bunch of questions, if even a single word can be interpreted to mean anything that could be considered false, then they charge him for perjury.

    Which is why Fauci took the 5th on every question last time. It's not that he's done anything incriminating (he was pardoned anyway) it's that he knows the point of the whole exercise is to incriminate him with perjury.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    This is why we need to abandon this mentality that pleading the 5th is the same thing as admitting guilt. Not only is it fundamentally not the same thing, and explicitly distinct from it, but it's also our first line of defense against abuses of power and politically targeted libel/smear campaigns such as this.

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  • [–] 58 points 1 month ago
    [–] 55 points 1 month ago (10 children)

    I don't get their strategy here. The current administration is what's causing all the food issues and measles outbreaks. Fauci has nothing to do with it.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 month ago

    Right now Republicans have no real wins that they can campaign on, and the ones that they can are unpopular even amongst their base. They have to drum up controversy and draw the spotlights to something, and this is the best they've got.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 month ago

    They don't care about that.

    Fauci knows things and is intelligent, made Donvict look stupid and he is the face of being told to do things that the conservative Karens didn't want to do: lockdowns, social distancing, wearing masks, and getting vaccinated.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago

    Bring him in and rake him over the coals. Let the dems scream and holler.

    Then when legitimate criminals of the current admin are brought in they will claim that the dems got all fussy with fauci so why are they doing this now.

    Which will rally their base and strengthen their vote.

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    [–] 38 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    weirdest witch hunt, feel bad for the guy and his family

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    [–] 35 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    He should quote Gilfoyle from Silicon Valley:

    Thanks for asking. I'm going to put this as delicately as I know how. You can chortle my balls.

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  • [–] 27 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    These people are like dogs that hate the veterinarian because they don't like taking medicine. You can understand a dog not understanding anything about medicine, but people in elected office? I'd say it's shameful behaviour, but these people know no shame.

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    [–] 22 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Sheesh, leave that man alone.

    It's so sad that they're still harping on this, and it's disgusting how they pile on him now that they have the power.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 month ago (9 children)

    Dr Fauci, you seem like a sensible person.

    Come to NZ we like sensible people here.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago (8 children)

    Which parties are rising over there?

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  • [–] 16 points 1 month ago (7 children)

    Far right extremism seems to be on the rise everywhere.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    That's the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around. How are people so shitty fucking everywhere?

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago

    I think it's just been too long since a lot of people have been exposed to the horrors of conflict. I think wars tend to harden a people and make them more conservative and insular, and then in the peace they remember how awful the war was for their parent or something and swing the other way. But eventually that awful feeling goes away and everyone wants to see who has the biggest dick all over again.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago

    Propaganda, which is a form of highly-crafted group emotional manipulation much more than it is any form of informational content, has a LOT to do with enabling and perpetuating emotion-based thinking, which in turn enables this lurch to the right which benefits only a scarce few among us, who are the ones paying for all the emotion-triggering propaganda.

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  • Because conditions are getting worse. People are being stretched thin, so they're looking for a radical change. And the far right is promising radical improvements, even if those promises are full of shit. It also doesn't help that many leftists have made a sport out of purity testing, pushing away many people who skew left in their political opinions but don't follow the hive mind.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 month ago

    Where is Sir Bedevere when we need him?

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