Tennessee Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn became the Twitter villain du jour after she attempted to drag Dr. Anthony Fauci for writing a book about his experience as the country's foremost pandemic expert.
Instead, Blackburn herself was the one who got dragged, after she posted a tone-deaf tweet, seen below, that made insinuations of callousness and incompetence about Fauci for his choice to pen the upcoming tome.
The tweet is ridiculous on its face, especially coming from Blackburn, a die-hard Trump supporter who has worked diligently to undermine her constituents' access to healthcare and has repeatedly voted against pandemic relief bills.
Blackburn's main work to fight the pandemic has been a sustained effort to place blame for the pandemic on China. Those efforts include legislation, such as a bill she and fellow Republican Senators Daines and McSally introduced that would allow U.S. citizens to sue China for its role in the pandemic.
And that's all before we get to the fact that Blackburn herself wrote a book last year and spent much of the fall making the rounds on talkshows promoting it.
But even setting that aside, Fauci's writing project, called Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward, is hardly the type of undertaking that would detract from his work as a doctor and scientist. It's a scant 80 pages long, the bulk of which is composed of reprints of interviews Fauci has given over his 34-year tenure as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
And the project isn't even a money-making enterprise. National Geographic Books, for whom Fauci wrote the short tome confirmed in a statement Fauci isn't even being paid any royalties for the book.
In short, the whole thing is a fake controversy manufactured by Blackburn.
Twitter wasn't about to let her get away with it.
For her part, Blackburn responded to the criticism of her tweet by doubling down with a tweeted video in which she spread conspiracy theories about Chinese scientists intentionally releasing the virus onto the public and accused Mark Zuckerberg of covering it up.
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