I spoke too hastily yesterday.
True, it was only a comment, not a whole diary, but I got something wrong.
I said that Jesse Watters would respond to serious pushback by claiming that what he said was just a joke, and then I explained why the joke wasn’t funny at all, and should not be tolerated.
But now Watters is not saying that he was “joking.” He is saying that he was “metaphor”-ing. All that talk about taking the “kill shot” was meant to describe ambushing Dr. Fauci in public with a question, and video-recording his answer, which Watters was sure would be weak and laughable.
Oh. Right. That makes it all better. At least that seems to be the media’s judgment. When I searched the topic in Google News, I found a string of headlines that shouted, more or less, “Fauci calls for Watters to be fired.” Maybe it’s just me, but I got the impression that the story was that Dr. Fauci over-reacted.
Then I saw the Snopes take on the situation. They took the question “Did Jesse Watters Call for Fauci’s Assassination?” and issued a ruling of “False.”
Well, of course! Anybody with a brain would know that Watters was not literally calling for an assassination. But apparently Snopes (which I generally respect but do not always agree with) chose to reply to those who seemed to think that Watters was directly calling for a literal kill shot. By doing that, they gave support to those who think that Dr. Fauci over-reacted.
No, he didn’t. He reacted the way that I think most reasonable men would react to what Watters said. The “metaphor” was deeply, deeply disturbing, and it absolutely could be understood by some wacko as a call to take the metaphor literally. I think that if a young high school student somewhere posted those exact words on Twitter and directed them at an unpopular teacher at the school, the local police would be absolutely justified in paying a visit to that young man (or woman).
So, yes, Dr. Fauci was absolutely right in calling for Watters’ firing, and everybody who predicted that Fox News will do absolutely nothing except defend Watters was also absolutely right.