THURSDAY, JULY 30, 2026
Then later, the "cable news" kidz: Last evening, on The Last Word, Lawrence O'Donnell very much did get it right.
He opened with the Fauci hearing, not with some bit of relative ephemera. He even said this, in passing, as he discussed the astonishing conduct put on display in the Senate hearing room:
No Republican senator mentioned today that, on his last day if office—on January 19, 2021—Donald Trump gave Dr. Fauci the Presidential Commendation.
For the record, it was part of a set of Presidential Commendations given to several dozen members of the "Operation Warp Speed Team." General Milley was even commended by President Trump that day, just to refresh you on the way these things can change.
O'Donnell started with the astonishing hearing, exactly as he (and others) should have done. He was wise enough to name the madness on display in the hearing room. He played tape of Senator Blumenthal saying that yesterday's hearing was "one of the darkest days in Senate history," and he added such assessments as these:
Republican senators disgraced themselves today, attacking the man who saved lives, possibly millions of lives, during the Covid-19 outbreak.
[Dr. Fauci's opening statement] led Rand Paul to turn his hearing room into the most disgraceful Stalinist tribunal the United States Senate has ever seen.
Did Dr. Fauci save millions of lives? We can't answer that question.
Was this really the most disgraceful Stalinist tribunal the United States Senate has ever seen? We can't assess that either!
That said, given the madness put on display by Republican senators, it's hard to believe that this wasn't "one of the darkest days in the history of the Senate"—a day so gruesome that one of the mutts was even willing to showboat by saying this to the committee's lone witness:
Here I am sitting in front of you six years later saying, "Who the fuck do you think you were for doing that?"
Yes, that was actually said.
We're dealing with anthropology here—with the level to which tribal groups may descend when they've convinced themselves that it's time to engage in a vast tribal war. Yesterday, how bad did the madness get?
In the case of Moreno, Johnson, Tuberville, Hawley we'd say it got astoundingly bad. We thought again of Professor Knox's description of the mayhem which occurred when the Achaeans finally overran Troy, but that (fictional) exhibition of human fury involved acts we won't return to today.
We may attempt to memorialize yesterday's madness in a set of reports next week. For today, we want to give you one example of the lunacy put on display by the Republican solons gone wild, and one example of the madness put on display by The Five.
Example one: The Wisconsin senator's tale
Yesterday afternoon, Wu and Engber produced an instant account of the mayhem for The Atlantic. Their overview reads like this:
What Anthony Fauci Didn’t Say
[...]
Senator Paul had said he called the hearing—billed simply as “Testimony of Anthony Fauci”—because “the American people deserve answers” about Fauci’s role in the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, the American people got something absurd: a three-hour spectacle of unchallenged allegations and distorted facts.
To the extent that we the people still exist, we were exposed to a boatload of "distorted facts," Wu and Engber wrote.
"Distorted facts" is a strange construction. Here's one example of what they meant. It comes from Senator Johnson:
[T]he most obvious distortions at the hearing came from the Senate panel. Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, proposed that the pulmonary infarction Fauci experienced in 2021—the details of which were revealed in the pages from Fauci’s private diary that Paul released last weekend—may have resulted from COVID vaccination and booster shots. More than 39,000 deaths had resulted from COVID-19 vaccination, he said, and although Facebook had censored his supporters when they tried to share that fact, “this wasn’t disinformation, this was the truth.”
Fauci only sat there with his fingers clasped. He did not point out that this was not the truth at all, and that Johnson’s data—derived from unvetted, user-submitted information in the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System—are likely to overestimate the real total by about 1,000 times.
Senator Johnson has sometimes been described as the Senate's dumbest member. That was before Senator Tuberville came along and sought to wrestle that crown away.
However that contest might be judged, Wu and Engber estimate that Johnson's data were inaccurate by a factor of one thousand!
Are Wu and Engber right about that? Given Johnson's long track record, we know of no obvious reason to disbelieve what they've said.
Example two: Compagno, one of The Five
Wu and Engber posted at 5 p.m., just as The Five was starting to air on the Fox News Channel. It's our flailing nation's most-watched "cable news" show.
Yesterday's edition was a debacle. The program opened with a segment about the Fauci hearing. The mutt Greg Gutfeld, going first, quickly offered this dispatch from a distant tribal reserve:
GUTFELD (7/29/26): There's one question, it's such an easy question, and he [Dr. Fauci] should answer it:
How did he know the origins of the Covid virus when he said it was a wet market? It was one of those things where like, we knew that it was the lab leak. But how did he know?
This manifest nutcase—and we're sorry, but that's what he is—did stumble forward from there. But in that passage, Gutfeld was assuring Fox News viewers that they and their tribe have brilliantly known all along that Covid-19 originated in the Wuhan lab
Out here in the actual world, no such thing can be said to be "known" today. Nor do we have any idea what this disturbed, disordered man meant when he seemed to say that Dr. Fauci has declared that the virus originated in the Wuhan wet market.
That isn't the position that Dr. Fauci has routinely voiced—but so what? Fox News viewers were now bring handed their angry tribe's reassuring scripture.
Assessed by any rational standard, a nation in which a nut-ball like Gutfeld is a leading figure in broadcast news has already become a failed state. Accordingly, the miserable performances continued from there, with recitations by Watters and Ford which we'll expect to assess next week.
Straining for coherence as always, Emily Compagno spoke last. In its embarrassing entirety, here's what the Fox savant said. We invite you to give it a look:
COMPAGNO: For a party that flies planes and launches campaigns based on "no kings," it's shocking to me that they worshiped this one man, and based on his unilateral recommendations threw in the towel for everything, followed him blindly, and now that's the reason they can't bear to acknowledge that behind the curtain the whole time was a little tiny man pretending to be Oz.
If the science had been correct, if his diary said, "Yes, all of my research shows that everything I've been saying on air is true, I stand behind it," then it would just be a shame. But now it is a sham. Now it is downright fraud and negligence and corruption and concealment of government records and obstruction of justice and so much more, and by the way, the standard for negligence, as you knew or should have known, he doesn't even have to have malintent to be on the hook for that at the state level, so what I see here is not that Operation Warp Speed was the result of a concerted effort in wartime from a country. I see that it was simply at the behest of one small, egomaniacal, sullen, hubris-infected individual that made everyone fall in line after him and those that dared to question him in any way, shape or form were vilified and ostracized.
And in addition to those—we can never get them back—million deaths, what about the hundreds of thousands of livelihoods and businesses? The weaponization of the administrative state, the multiple felonies that were booked because people dared to keep serving others in restaurants, and this guy dares to say in his opening statement that it was about embarrassing him or intimidating him and that he somehow had a right to privacy of his private diaries on a government computer?
No, Idiot! For someone that was a public servant for decades, he should know a pen he held was never his own personal pen, everything was actually owned by the American people and that we do, therefore, have an interest in reading it.
Thank God, in fact, he did write it on a government computer like an idiot, because now we can see that he was downright lying,
And for a scientist that people held him above that standard, they said with impunity we believe him because he should be above all politics and above all ego, instead we learn that he was simply lying for his own monetary and fame gain, which is the most tragic thing of all because it is so ephemeral, it is so gross.
And to see him today at the hearing—just final quick thought on this:
He did not even have the integrity to look those lawmakers in the eyes when they were detailing the lies that he ruined while he contrasted the death toll of that day on the same page with his Vanity Fair cover story, for example. He makes me sick. and I know that despite this limited pardon, there will be accountability, legally, for him, and likely criminally, moving forward.
Yes, that's what she said. The name-calling was general over her high-speed, garbled remarks.
According to the perpetually furious Compagno, Dr. Fauci is an "idiot." He's "a little tiny man pretending to be Oz," she said. He's "a small, egomaniacal, sullen, hubris-infected individual" who makes Compagno sick.
As to what this idiot has done wrong—as to the offenses for which he faces criminal liability moving forward—the picture was much less clear.
Most strikingly, Compagno said Dr. Fauci was "downright lying" about something at some point in time. But she never got around to saying what the "downright lies" actually were, or how she feels so sure that Fauci's statements were wrong.
Most clearly, Compagno complains that Dr. Fauci thought he could assume future privacy when he recorded his daily experiences on a government computer. Also, he wouldn't look Republican statesmen in the eye when they were saying things like this:
Here I am sitting in front of you six years later saying, "Who the fuck do you think you were for doing that?"
In the face of such obvious greatness, the small man with all the hubris refused to make eye contact!
It's madness to have people like Gutfeld and Compagno on the air at our nation's most watched news channel. But then again, We Blues!
We Blues! At our largest news orgs, our tribunes refuse to report and discuss the daily madness being created at the channel in question.
People like Gutfeld, Compagno and Watters offer manifest lunacy—remarkable imitations of life—every day of the week. But then again, We Blues!
When Compagno offers garbled fury—when Gutfeld slimes and cons the nation—our "journalists" all know what to do:
They agree to look away!
Tomorrow: Lawrence O'Donnell cops a plea on behalf of Blue America's press
