
The two Anthonys are the former Chief Medical Advisor to the President, namely Anthony Fauci, and the former Justice of the Supreme Court, namely Anthony Kennedy.
The story of Anthony Fauci is well documented. He was a respected scientist who started believing – and relishing – his own press in the course of the worldwide pandemic and national tragedy that we call Covid.
If he’d had the money, Fauci would have set up his own Twitter-like social media outlet. As it was, he didn’t need to, because he effectively owned the real Twitter. Back in the pre-Elon days, Twitter embraced any praise of him and censored any criticism of him.
“Embraced” is a good word to use in connection with Fauci. His dairy released by the Senate this week shows a man engaged in self-embrace and self-pleasure. Tony wrote love letters to Tony. Tony gave big hugs for Tony. Tony all but had a Tony fan club, and he was the biggest fan of all. Tony lamented that he didn’t have time to read all of Tony’s press but, paradoxically, Tony had time to write about all the press that Tony didn’t have time to read about.
That alone is unseemly but it is not a crime. Many people like or even love themselves. Their love letters to themselves are embarrassing but not criminal.
What is criminal are two things. First, Fauci misled the American people about the source of Covid. It was apparently a leak from a Chinese bioweapons lab, after all, not a naturally occurring virus that jumped to humans in the “wet markets” of China. Maybe Covid really should have kept its original name of “Chinese flu.” At the time, however, the media decided that naming it the “Chinese flu” because it indisputably started in China, one way or another, would be racist. (Never mind the precedent of “Spanish flu” for a flu that didn’t even start in Spain.)
Second, Fauci lied to both the American people and the American Congress about the dangers of Covid to otherwise healthy people. The fatality rate actually was on the order of the fatality rate for ordinary flu – well less than 1% and much less than that for people who are young, notwithstanding the masks still being worn by Democrats who are still in solidarity with Fauci. Accordingly, Fauci locked down the country and produced a crisis in education and acculturation that we’re still dealing with six years later.
The lying to Congress is known as the crime of perjury. To avoid yet another count of perjury, Fauci refused to answer over 100 questions posed by the Senate this week. He did get some additional attention in his tiresome invocation of the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, but not the kind he relishes.
Viewed generously, Fauci’s lies for the Chinese were perhaps in the interest of maintaining cordial relations with America’s biggest geopolitical rival. In the course of dealing with a worldwide pandemic, we didn’t want to also deal with WW III.
And Fauci’s lies to Congress and other Americans about the dangers of Covid to healthy people might be seen as an exercise in caution. He figured it was better to be extra careful by exaggerating the dangers of Covid than to be reckless and thereby contribute to the extinction of humanity. (Forget about kids’ education and well-being; his allies in the teachers’ unions want more days off.)
But aren’t both of those justifications for Fauci’s lies beyond his pay grade? Aren’t they matters for a boss to decide – like a President? Or, better yet, aren’t they issues for the American people?
Memo to Fauci: We can handle the truth.
Then there is the other Anthony, the one called Justice Anthony Kennedy. He was Ronald Reagan’s second choice for a vacant Supreme Court seat, after the great jurist Robert Bork had been, well, borked by a Senate Judiciary Committee headed by a man who went on become senile (if he wasn’t born senile) named Joe Biden.
Justice Kennedy, it is rumored (but I have this on good authority), was known to ask his clerks to scour the newspapers each day to retrieve any press clippings that mentioned him. They were to leave the clippings on his desk so that he could read all about himself.
Kennedy, mind you, putatively was not a politician. He was a Supreme Court Justice with life tenure.
Kennedy’s most famous Supreme Court opinion was the 2015 case giving gays the Constitutional right to marry one another. I personally have no quarrel with a gay person marrying whomever or whatever he or she or they or it wants, so long as I’m not required somehow to recognize it as a matter of my religion.
But I think the Court was amiss in this decision. The states and the people were rapidly coming to my point of view. Why not let things play out in the court of public opinion on this matter of cultural norms that has no legitimate legal loadstar, rather than letting lawyers argue it in the highest court?
Why not, you ask? Because that would preclude Kennedy from being the hero, that’s why. There are those press clippings he had to worry about, you know.
I don’t mean to suggest that Justice Kennedy’s self-aggrandizement was equivalent to Fauci’s embarrassing self-pleasuring or criminal deceit. The two are of different orders, and I strongly doubt that Justice Kennedy ever committed a crime.
But I do mean that public servants should serve the public. Their first priority should be the public good, not their so-called legacy.






