THE AMERICAN POSEIDON ADVENTURE

Dear Senator Moreno:

I am writing to express my profound disgust at the abusive, derisive, and profane language you directed toward Dr. Anthony Fauci during a United States Senate hearing.

Dr. Fauci is an 84-year-old physician and public servant whose work helped save countless lives during the AIDS epidemic, the COVID-19 pandemic, and numerous other public-health crises. While you were building your career selling automobiles, Dr. Fauci , risking his own life, was confronting deadly and poorly understood diseases, working with patients, scientists, and public-health officials to identify their causes and limit their spread.

That contrast does not diminish your business accomplishments. It does, however, make your contemptuous treatment of a distinguished physician and longtime public servant especially disgraceful.

COVID-19 was an extraordinarily complicated event. Scientists and government officials were required to make decisions while confronting an evolving virus, incomplete information, and uncertainty concerning its origins, transmission, and long-term effects. Some decisions were undoubtedly imperfect and deserve serious, fact-based examination.

Temporary institutional closures, restrictions on large gatherings, masking recommendations, and other public-health measures were not inherently acts of persecution or attempts to abolish constitutional rights. They were efforts, rightly or wrongly calibrated, to slow the transmission of a dangerous disease, prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed, and protect vulnerable Americans.

The Senate hearing should have provided an opportunity for sober inquiry into what worked, what failed, and how the nation can respond more effectively to the next pandemic. Instead, your conduct helped turn it into a sad, bottom-of-the-barrel political spectacle.

Your language did not advance the search for truth. It did not clarify the origins of COVID-19. It did not improve public-health policy or prepare the country for the next emergency. It merely demeaned a witness, degraded the Senate, and demonstrated the alarming condition of our present political leadership.

America desperately needs leaders interested in learning from the past and moving the country forward. Instead, too many elected officials appear more interested in humiliating public servants and pummeling those who struggled, sometimes successfully and sometimes imperfectly, to protect the American people.

Public officials must be held accountable, but accountability is not the same as abuse. Oversight is not the same as personal degradation. Profanity and intimidation are not substitutes for evidence, judgment, or leadership.

The stain of this shameful behavior rests not only upon those who engage in it, but upon all of us who permit our government to become a cannibalistic circular firing squad, a political culture increasingly synonymous with creatures that devour their own.

You owe Dr. Fauci, the United States Senate, and the American people an apology.

Sincerely,

Robert Detor