(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . McCarthy puts a pair of unhinged conspiracy cranks in his new pandemic oversight subcommittee [1] ['Daily Kos Staff', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-01-25 When it comes to wondering just who House Republican leadership would bless the nation with, when it comes to a new subcommittee devoted to investigating the government's alleged overreaction to a pandemic disease that would quickly kill 1 million Americans and will now be with the world from here on in, it was never a burning question. Just think of the worst choices possible. Yeah, it's them. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy wobbled bonelessly out on Tuesday to announce the Republican picks for the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, and the most prominent names on that list would have to be Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is point-blank a pandemic conspiracy theorist, and Rep. Ronny Freaking Jackson, who is point-blank a pandemic conspiracy theorist and then some. Republicans have already indicated that they will be using this "select subcommittee" to examine why government was super-mean to Americans, recommending masks and vaccines and social distancing rather than doing Approximately Not A Damn Thing, and if you remember anything about the Trump administration you'll remember that Team Not A Damn Thing had the upper hand through much of Trump's tenure to begin with. From everything-guru Jared Kushner's disinterest in mounting a pandemic response in the early days when Democratic-leaning coastal cities were bearing the brunt of the deaths to the government's abysmal response to exhausted medical stockpiles, private and public pandemic experts were battling tooth and nail to convince government to implement any of the pandemic emergency responses that had been designed with precisely such a scenario in mind. The dynamic almost immediately became one in which experts would recommend social distancing measures in regions with crashing hospital systems, would recommend quarantine when exposed to someone else who was sick, and would recommend masking when in public spaces, only to have Republican officials and social gadflies fire back furiously each time to declare that doing any of those things was too great a burden on our freedomz to be justified by such a piffling challenge as a newly emergent pandemic illness killing off Americans in such numbers as to require the bodies to be stacked in refrigerated trucks while communities wrestled with where to put them all. There's a lot to explore about the government response to the pandemic. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, however, isn't interested. x Named to the Subcommittee on The Coronavirus Pandemic https://t.co/N5ZIE8ZfYR — Acyn (@Acyn) January 24, 2023 Greene's contribution to the COVID-19 pandemic has been, near exclusively, the promotion of conspiracy theories, and among the most repulsive of them is the bizarre QAnon-laced hoax claiming that the pandemic isn't killing people: Doctors and the government are killing people with supposedly-"deadly" COVID-19 vaccines. This is absolute bunk. We know the potential side effects of the vaccine quite well at this point—and we know that the risks involved are miniscule. We also know the effects of catching COVID-19, and those effects include permanent organ damage and, in nearly 7 million cases worldwide, death. About one in six COVID-19 deaths worldwide are in the United States, putting this nation near the top of global deaths-per-capita statistics. That is not enough to prove to Marjorie Taylor Greene that COVID-19 is, in fact, quite a dangerous disease. Instead, Greene has been promoting the hoax film "Died Suddenly," an off-the-wall, thoroughly bonkers conspiracy-o-rama premised on the notion that people around the nation are dropping dead because they got vaccinated and GoVeRnMeNT iS CoVEriNG iT UP. That's right, kids. One of the lawmakers examining whether our government's response to a deadly pandemic was commensurate with the disease's dangers is coming to the table with the theory that Actually, "it's not dangerous" if you get the virus that's killed 1 million Americans but it's the masks and vaccines you have to watch out for. Among Greene's many, many contributions to Our Discourse: • Getting banned from Facebook and Twitter for spreading false information about the pandemic. • Comparing rules requiring the wearing of masks in public to the Holocaust. (She also called them "tyrannical," "oppressive," and "emasculating" for boys. • Calling vaccination cards "Biden's mark of the beast," and "fascism," and "communism." • Calling the pandemic a "manufactured plague" and "Chinese-made." • Appearing at a conference hosted by notorious antisemitic white supremacist Nick Fuentes. That's not pandemic-related, she's just a terrible person in general. She also hangs out with Rep. Matt Gaetz, and when Rep. Matt Gaetz was caught by journalists as both a frequenter of coke parties and a sex trafficker, Marjorie Taylor Greene immediately began hanging around him more. As (ahem) bracing as Marjorie Taylor Greene's presence on a witch-hunting subcommittee looking to drag pandemic experts to the cameras so that they can be blamed for doing too much to save American lives is, there is still one person likely to outdo her. We haven't heard much from Rep. Ronny Jackson yet because, frankly, even the rest of the Republican Party has been doing its damndest to stay faaaaaar away from the Trump White House doctor turned full-time conspiracy addict, but that's about to change. Now-Rep. Ronny Jackson, aka Dr. Pills, isn't entirely clear on what the premise of the committee he's joining actually is. Dr. Pills thinks it's a committee formed to prove that COVID-19 was manufactured by Chinese scientists because reasons. The Subcommittee’s objective is to investigate the large volume of evidence that the virus originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and that it did not occur naturally. The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic is determined to discover the truth and deliver transparency to the American people. Uh, is it? Is that the subcommittee's objective? That's probably going to be news to everyone else, but if Ronny Jackson has made a name for himself in anything since being shuffled out of the Trump White House after news of drunken benders and accusations of prescription abuse, it's for an unending parade of extremely wacky statements. And Ronny Jackson, by God, isn't going to be constrained by your notions of reality. Democrats spent years refusing to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable for its role in causing a global pandemic. Over one million Americans have now perished, and millions of families are still recovering from the unhinged lockdowns. We can no longer ignore the mounting evidence suggesting the virus was leaked by the Chinese Communist Party. Furthermore, this lab received millions of dollars of taxpayer funding from Fauci’s National Institutes of Health for gain-of-function research. The blood of millions of Americans is on Fauci’s hands and he refuses to admit it. Together, with my colleagues in Congress, we will uncover the truth behind the origins of Covid. I promise you this: Fauci and those responsible for propagating the lies will be held accountable. On the bright side, Representative Ronny Feelgood is willing to admit that yes, over 1 million Americans are now dead. That's more than Marjorie Taylor Greene is willing to admit. On the not-so-bright side, he's still furious that the "unhinged lockdowns" kept that number from being, uh, higher. On the very not good side? All the rest of that. Yeeeeesh. You have to go through about six layers of QAnon lore and rub your face against Sen. Rand Paul's favorite shoes thrice to even begin explaining the theories behind theories he's going on about there, and none of us have that kind of time. Suffice it to say that the rest of the Republican members of the committee are going to try very very hard to keep Ronny Jackson from talking during committee meetings, even if they have to institute a "free all-you-can-eat cake to Ronny Jackson during committee meetings" rule in order to keep his piehole busy. This has all the makings, then, of an absolute dumpster fire. We've got a new Republican subcommittee examining the supposed "weaponization" of government against President Donald Glorious Golfing Trump, by which they mean attempts to hold Trump to account for an international extortion scheme and a failed coup attempt. That one will be under the purview of Coatless Jim Jordan, a man who was elevated to his current position as a one-stop shop for defenses of all known Republican scandals. We've got the far-right "Freedom Caucus" in charge of the House Rules Committee. Marjorie Taylor Greene has also been plopped into the Oversight committee, which is now to be turned into the Talking About Hunter Biden committee, and on Homeland Security, which presumably will explore the dangers of Italian vote-changing space lasers. And this. A subcommittee meant to review the government's emergency pandemic response measures, staffed with one Republican who thinks the pandemic was a hoax and that the real danger is in getting vaccinated because [high-pitched screeching noise] and another who thinks that China Did It On Purpose. It's going to be dumpster fire. It's going to be three dumpster fires. It's going to be a fire at the dumpster factory, and the adjacent tire factory, and at the Four Seasons Exotic Cake Shop sandwiched between the two. We are in for a hell of a ride and, before this is even close to over, probably the nationwide return of polio. x “Dr. Fauci, thank you for your service to our country and saving lives. When did you first learn that @RonnyJacksonTX was an unhinged lunatic? I yield back my time.” pic.twitter.com/WTW9ZN4Ca9 — Pete Souza (@PeteSouza) January 25, 2023 RELATED STORIES: House Republicans are firing up the Jim Jordan show, and it's going to be ugly The Freedom Caucus in now going to be in charge of House Rules. Wheeeeee!!!! McCarthy pays off Marjorie Taylor Greene with a pair of high-profile committee assignments [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/25/2149280/-McCarthy-puts-a-pair-of-unhinged-conspiracy-cranks-in-his-new-pandemic-oversight-subcommittee Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/