MONDAY, AUGUST 10, 2026
...elude the Times' Wallace-Wells? "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its shoes on?”
(Or while it's putting its pants on? Is that also true of a misstatement, even of a false impression?)
It's a famous apocryphal statement! Back in 2017, the New York Times shot the standard attribution down. The report by Nirai Chokshi started off like this:
That Wasn’t Mark Twain: How a Misquotation Is Born
How fitting that the man often credited with saying “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes” most likely did not invent the phrase.
Commonly attributed to Mark Twain, that quotation instead appears to be a descendant of a line published centuries ago by the satirist Jonathan Swift. Variants emerged and mutated over time until a modern version of the saying was popularized by a Victorian-era preacher, according to Garson O’Toole, a researcher who, like Twain, prefers a pseudonym.
And so on from there. All in all, Twain didn't say so many things you wonder if he ever made any real statements at all!
Wherever that famous bromide started, it's only that much truer today, given the speedy transmission of bogus claims our modern media make possible.
With that in mind, we start with a peculiar hook, one which seemed to appear in many post mortems of the charges made against Fauci in thar recent rage-filled Senate hearing.
David Wallace-Wells wrote the lengthy piece, and he's plenty sharp. We'll offer two clips from his lengthy piece, again for the New York Times. We were puzzled by his initial premise:
Fauci Has a Lot to Answer For. But We’re Asking the Wrong Questions.
Pleading the fifth was cowardly. It was also revelatory.
When Anthony Fauci categorically refused to answer any questions at a Senate committee hearing last week, he inadvertently showcased a throwback scene of irreconcilable pandemic partisanship. On one side were Republican ideologues boiling over with grievances familiar from 2020 and 2021. On the other side, Democrats nominally committed to the principle of defending science against partisan attacks but unsure exactly what that meant beyond lip service...
[...]
The United States was not the only country to wrestle with Covid, to improvise a policy response that upended the lives of its citizens or to watch as even burdensome restrictions failed to prevent a mass mortality event, only lightening it. But for years Fauci has been bullied and harassed and intimidated and, above all, vilified and scapegoated by bad-faith critics mounting contradictory attacks that allowed them to pin responsibility on one man for everything they might not have liked about the experience of living through a brutal pandemic. Yet that is exactly why Fauci should have talked last week: to answer those critics, defend his approach and those of his colleagues, and explain what lessons he’d learned and might like the rest of us to learn. Evidently, he felt too boxed in to try, even with Joe Biden’s blanket pardon in hand.
Say what? For years, Fauci had been vilified and scapegoated by critics mounting contradictory attacks? Indeed, they'd been doing so in bad faith?
But even in the madhouse environment in which the sitting president is trying to lock everyone up, he should have gone into that Senate hearing and taken his chances with the presumptive fairness of the Tr\ump/Blanche DOJ?
At age 85, in this madhouse environment, it was cowardly of him not to try? Are we all on the same planet here?
Many opinion and editorial writers have adopted this peculiar stance in their reviews of that Senate hearing. A bit later, Wallace-Wells extended his portrait of the venomous bad faith Dr. Fauci should have ignored:
...If you believe that the pandemic was the result of a lab leak, it’s not crazy to suspect that American support for gain-of-function research around the world may have played some role in bringing it about. How much responsibility remains an open question, because the subject of pandemic origins itself remains open as well. This is another reason that Fauci should have come prepared to explain and defend himself last week, as he told me he would several years ago if presented with the chance to expound at length and with nuance about the value of this kind of research.
But it is also politically convenient to make Fauci the sole villain in the lab leak morality tale, because so many of his haters have already taken to blaming him for everything else about the pandemic, no matter how contradictory their complaints.
You can’t think we overreacted, for instance, and at the same time think that Fauci was indifferent to ongoing American deaths during the period when pandemic restrictions were strictest. You can’t charge him with a million murders while doubting the mortality statistics or insisting that Covid was actually a “scamdemic.” (“It’s deadly and it didn’t matter and millions died, but it was fine,” as “The Daily Show” joked.) You also can’t pin the whole thing on Democratic safetyism when Trump was president through the most restrictive phase and pointedly criticized governors who wanted to reopen too soon...
"If you believe that the pandemic was the result of a lab leak, it’s not crazy to suspect that American support for gain-of-function research may have played some role in bringing it about?" The only question would be how much responsibility to dump on Fauci's head?
That seems to make perfect sense! But what if, apparently like Dr. Fauci, you don't believe that the pandemic came from the lab? And as he continues, Wallace-Wells further describes the "bad faith" to which he has already referred:
"You can't charge Fauci with a million murders"—some senators charged him with nine million deaths—"if you're also saying that the whole thing was a scam?" By now, Wallace-Wells is saying the tribal rage was so phony that it could be summarized in the way The Daily Show engineered:
“It’s deadly and it didn’t matter and millions died, but it was fine.”
To our eye, one analysis after another blew right past the apparent madness of the current age. In our view, our journalistic elites are having a very hard time understanding this basic fact:
A blatantly obvious type of plague is present within our own Oran.
Tomorrow, we'll visit another appraisal. Writing for The Atlantic, Peter Wehner starts right there, with a reference to Camus' The Plague, but after that the corrections and fact-checks start.
Are Wehner's defenses of Dr. Fauci accurate? How are we supposed to know? The "democratization of media" has created a type of modern Babel. Again and again, matters of technical complexity pretty much take over from there.
