Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio is a personification of the perverse corruption of the GOP and a pathetic little man. I mean “little” in all of its most withering implications. This is a man that should (allegedly) be in a jail cell, praying every moment of every day for forgiveness, for his suspected complicity in the sexual molestation and assaults of numerous young men under his charge when he was an assistant coach on the Ohio State University wrestling team. A reminder: Numerous former wrestlers say that they told then-coach Jim Jordan that they were being sexually assaulted or knew others were being assaulted by the team doctor Richard Strauss, and Jordan did not simply do nothing, he tried to keep them quiet about it. That is who Jim Jordan is. That’s it.
On Thursday, Republican Rep. Jordan sat on a House Oversight coronavirus subcommittee hearing that featured testimony by Dr. Anthony Fauci, because he’s the foremost expert in our country on the public health crisis we are facing. Jordan, no stranger to being full of shit, decided to use his time to whine and pretend that Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Democratic Party are stealing Americans’ civil liberties by advising we try to do everything possible to stop the spread of the virus that has claimed more than 560,000 American lives. An important note here is that under the Trump administration and the Republican Party, our country’s handling of the pandemic was so bad that our infections and deaths far outpaced most other countries in the world.
Dr. Fauci and the Democratic representatives on the committee tolerated Jordan’s histrionics for a couple of minutes before deciding to shut down the man who former Republican Speaker John Boehner remembers this way: “I just never saw a guy who spent more time tearing things apart -- never building anything, never putting anything together.”
Ostensibly, Jim Jordan’s angle was that everybody’s civil liberties are being crushed by public health officials who keep telling Americans that just going about like there is no pandemic has led to hundreds of thousands of dead Americans, millions of sick Americans, and elongated the timeline for returning to some normalcy in our country. Jordan’s only gotcha conflict here is he wants Dr. Anthony Fauci to give him a number, a number that does not exist, that would allow Jim Jordan to then cry about that number. Here’s a number Jim: Six. That’s the number of former wrestlers who say Jim Jordan knew about the abuse at OSU.
Dr. Fauci, then tried to center the conversation where it should be, public health. He simplified his language as much as he thought was possible without simply grunting, explaining that his answers have a foundational tenet—the COVID-19 pandemic is “a health thing.”
But it was this exchange, with Dr. Fauci telling Jordan to stop being so sensitive and making things personal, that has made the rounds. Dr. Fauci tried his most direct approach yet at explaining that the issue being manifested here is that it is officials like Jordan continue to misuse the public trust, and this has steered our country to well over half-a-million COVID-19 related deaths this past year.
Rep. Maxine Waters did her best to simplify the proceedings, as Jordan continued his bully-attempts at asking questions only his fragile ego can answer for him well after his allotted time, telling him to “shut your mouth.”
Say what you will about the Republican Party, they have been one hundred percent wrong about every aspect of the 2019 novel coronavirus pandemic. At every single step, instead of taking the proverbial bull by the horns—something that would have likely won them the 2020 election—they have lied and misinformed and made political a seemingly no-brainer issue of public health. It is easy to say that this is what the Republican Party is and it is easy to say that the Republican Party is in the pockets of big money interests but that does not take into account the full breadth and scope of their criminal incompetence.
You can watch the entire six-and-a-half minutes below.
