Dr. Anthony Fauci's prevarications have become so numerous, wide-ranging, and convoluted that it's next to impossible to know what, if anything, can be believed coming from his lips.  He's the living, lying embodiment of Aesop's "Boy Who Cried Wolf."  A Wall Street Journal column by Gary Saul Morson captures the problem succinctly:

"Dr. Fauci admitted that he first stated that masks were ineffective in part because there was a shortage of masks and he wanted to preserve them for medical workers, who needed them most..."

"He doesn't seem to have considered: Once he shades the truth for a reason of policy, why shouldn't reasonable people assume his other statements are based on policy considerations rather than science?"

Why, indeed?  When do you believe a proven, even a confessed liar?

Morson, a professor of Slavic languages and literature and co-author of Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us, doesn't limit his critique to Fauci's prevarications.  He writes about what Russians some time ago dubbed "partisan science."

Trust me (because I've never lied to you): this is something the Russians know a lot about.

"Perhaps the clearest sign that a scientist, or anyone else, is misrepresenting science," Morson writes, "is a confusion of a science with political or social claims that it is thought to imply. That is what social Darwinists and Soviet dialectical materialists did. Such claims are never scientific. They are a clear sign of pseudoscience. One must argue for or against the social or political implications of a scientific discovery in the same way as for any social or political ideas[.] ...

"When President Biden ... claims he is only 'following the science,' one can be sure that he isn't. Should we lock down? Lockdowns, like any other policy, entail costs as well as benefits. How do we weigh them? ... Science can inform a policy decision, but whatever judgment one makes, it cannot be based wholly on the science."

We've seen this horror show before.  Remember "global warming"?  They lied, cherry-picked, and distorted so much about it that its "true believers" had to start calling it something else: "climate change."  Same lies, different label.  Nah, nothing deceptive about that.  Remember Al Gore's Fauci impersonation: "The science is settled!"

As Morson's excellent column makes clear, science is never settled.  Politics may be, especially back in Russia's Soviet days.  But not science.  To claim that science is settled, as Morson so eloquently explains, is simply an unscientific claim.

Beware, my gullible countrymen.  The snake oil salesmen are ramping up their lies to persuade you that you must obey their onerous diktats and accept as "settled science" their concocted hypotheses that are anything but settled.  Behind the curtain, they are piling up the profits, now in the trillions of dollars, almost all of it in taxpayer's money.  Just as with global warming/climate change, it's never about what they claim it's about.  It's always about control and money.  Their control and your money.

Morson caps his column off with the coup de grâce:

If scientists expect their statements to be trusted, they must themselves be trustworthy in making them. One had better be scrupulously honest before asking people to surrender their own judgment and simply believe what they are told. Scientists should be especially careful not to misrepresent political or policy judgments as being scientific. And they must protest vigorously and loudly when other influential people claim to speak in the name of science while misrepresenting it.

We may, and maybe we should, forgive Fauci.  But there is no reason ever to believe another word from his lying lips.

Mark Landsbaum is a Christian retired journalist, former investigative reporter, editorial writer, and columnist.  He also is a husband, father, grandfather, and Dodgers fan.  He can be reached at mark.landsbaum@gmail.com. 

Image: NIAID.

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