Stories like this one remind me just how deep and complex the ethics void is becoming in our society and institutions. The hackneyed way of describing it would be “Why we can’t have nice things.” It is an ethics mess, rather than an ethics train wreck, just an icky, stinky, pile of unethical goo emanating from people and places that can’t be trusted.

Let’s pick our way through it. Get your gloves and Lysol, and put a clothespin on your nose…

1. First, as we already know, Anthony Fauci appeared before Congress again and blithely admitted, again, that he and his colleagues were just making stuff up while causing the country to shut down its commerce, education, and social life, and lying about it, which is what pretending something is “science” when it’s really CYA maneuvering. As before, he wasn’t even contrite or apologetic about this.

He’s an asshole. (that is not an ad hominem attack, by the way.) Also an Ethics Villain.

2. During the hearing, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), produced a photo of drugged puppies (at least it wasn’t nude pictures of Hunter Biden this time) and confronted the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, saying, “As director of NIH, you did sign off on these so-called scientific experiments. And as a dog lover, I want to tell you this is disgusting and evil. What you signed off on and these experiments that happened to beagles paid for by the American taxpayer. And I want you to know Americans don’t pay their taxes for animals to be tortured like this.” Fauci, who, unlike the Georgia congresswoman, is not an idiot, asked plaintively, “What does dogs have to do with anything that we’re talking about today?”

The answer is “Nothing!, of course, other than Greene engaging in her usual kamikaze well-poisoning act. She just as reasonably could have produced old emails in which Fauci announced his love of “Pootie Tang,” “Porkie’s” or Paulie Shore movies. Or maybe introduced an old high school classmate who had suddenly remembered that he snapped her bra strap in the 8th grade. It is amazing that this nation can function at all with so many total incompetents and ethics dunces in Congress on both sides of the aisle. Everyone in Greene’s district should wear bags over their heads in shame until she is voted out, and anyone who has voted for her should be required to use only plastic utensils for their own safety.

In some positive news on the general topic of unfit fools in Congress, polls seem to indicate that the ridiculous Rep. Jamaal Bowman, he of the “I don’t know what a fire alarm looks like!” fiasco, is headed for a landslide defeat in his primary. Good. One idiot down, about 40 to go.

3. Then the Washington Post, good little Deep State and Fauci enabler that it is, decided to come to the Ethics Villain’s rescue. It sicced its reliably biased “factchecker” Glenn Kessler on the NIH dog story, which is four years old. he immediately signaled his bias—that’s nice of him—referring to Greene’s ambush as “another in a string of misleading attacks against Fauci, who became the public face of the government’s response to the pandemic.” There’s nothing “misleading” about the attacks on Fauci, who has been exposed as a double-talking, evasive, irresponsible official who abused his power and influence, crippling the nation in the process, but if Republicans say the sky is blue, Kessler is likely to come out with a factcheck that says it’s puse.

What follows is a mind-numbingly long and convoluted recitation of the controversy, and anyone who reads it all the way through deserves a Daniel Webster see-gar. This kind of writing is incompetent, and suspicious: it’s like a written fusibility. If a columnist can’t be more concise and clear that this, then he should write about something else. Along the way, Kessler announces his ignorance of basic management ethics, writing, “[I]t’s silly to personally blame Fauci for the design of research studies — about 5,500 were approved by NIAID just in 2023 — endorsed many levels below the director.”

No, Glenn, it’s not “silly,” it’s called responsibility and accountability. The leader of an organization is responsible for what happens in the organization he oversees. That’s what “blame” is: responsibility. The Washington Post correctly skewered Ken Lay when he argued that what happened at Enron wasn’t his fault, even though he was the CEO. Fauci’s excuse that he wasn’t responsible for what went on in his own organization is essentially the same.

If one can wade through Kessler’s account, it becomes obvious that there was a cover-up at NIH while Fauci was in charge. Typically, the Post (Kessler) carefully chooses words to obfuscate this and rationalize it as much as possible. “The emails show that NIH was not fully transparent as it tried to handle a public-relations nightmare,” Kessler writes. If you are not “fully transparent,” then you are not transparent. The NIH was transparent, see, and transparent is good, but just not fully transparent, but that’s a lot to ask and nobody’s perfect, after all. And besides, it was dealing with a”public relations nightmare”! A nightmare, I tell you! Doesn’t that justify being non-transparent? Kessler frames this as if the “nightmare” just ambushed the NIH through no fault of its own. The “nightmare” was entirely of the NIH’s own making.