It has been 85 years, and a lot of us have forgotten Wrong Way Corrigan, the pilot who, in 1938, took off from Brooklyn for a flight to Long Beach, California and landed in Dublin 38 hours later. When he got back from Ireland, he became famous as America’s favorite goofball, and he pretty much retained that title for the rest of his life. It was a silly story, and nobody really got hurt. Not even Corrigan.
But
being a goofball is not as cute as it used to be. Today, it seems, there are lots of people who
have committed dreadful errors but, for political reasons, will never pay a
price. One of my favorites is a
superstar D.C. lawyer named Jamie Gorelick.
Important
note. There are lots of people in
America who have committed horrible crimes but who, for political reasons, will
never pay a price for them. You know
their names---Bill and Hillary, Fauci, Obama, the Bidens, etc. I’m not talking
about them. I don’t view Jamie Gorelick
as a criminal though you may be able to find “crimes” in the U.S. Code that she
has committed. (We all commit two or
three a day without even noticing.) But
I’m not charging Jamie with being a criminal.
She’s just an idiot who managed to remain an EXTREMELY important player in
Washington no matter what she did. For
thirty years.
Gorelick
graduated from Harvard Law (of course!) in 1975, and then disappears from
public view until 1994 when Bill Clinton appoints her Deputy US Attorney
General. She immediately flies into
action by initiating procedures for the investigation of the 1993 World Trade Center
bombing. These included drafting the
famous memo setting up a “wall” between criminal investigators and
counterintelligence authorities.
According to Attorney General John Ashcroft (and many others), Gorelick’s
memo is the reason the feds were
never able to put the pieces together to stop the 9-11 attacks. The 9-11 Commission itself, to which Gorelick had somehow managed to get
herself appointed, never mentioned the “wall” memo in its report.
In
1997, after her stint at the DOJ, Gorelick was appointed Vice Chairman of
Fannie Mae, where she served until 2003 and collected $26.5 million in salary
and bonuses. In a 2002 interview,
Gorelick assured Business Week that
Fannie Mae was managed safely and that it was “among a handful of top-quality
institutions.” Shortly thereafter, the
Fannie Mae accounting scandal erupted as regulators caught the company hiding
$9 billion in unrecorded losses.
Back in
private practice in 2008, Gorelick represented Duke University in the infamous
Duke lacrosse case, where the university and a prosecutor were found to have
railroaded dozens of innocent athletes in order to support local activists and
race-hustlers in a hoax accusing the white lacrosse players of crude and
obscene behavior.
You
would think these incidents might be enough to tarnish Gorelick’s reputation,
but no. In Washington, if you are a
leftist in good standing, no act of idiocy is sufficient to get you kicked off
the gravy train. Hey, man, she went to
Harvard! Sure, “mistakes were made,” but
how can you blame Jamie?
In
March of 2022, Gorelick was appointed by Joe Biden as Chair of the Homeland
Security Advisory Council. What could go
wrong?
But
Jamie Gorelick is 72 years old. There’s
probably not much more damage she can do.
It seems unlikely she will ever have the pull she did in the 1990s when
she single-handedly prevented us from seeing 9-11 was coming.
That’s
why we need Zeynep Tufekci.
It’s a
Turkish name, and she was born in Istanbul, but she is now a sociology
professor at Columbia University whose work, and op-eds, often appear in the
New York Times. Let us note at the outset
that she has no training in medicine or epidemiology or viruses.
Until
April 3, 2020, Anthony Fauci, the CDC, the WHO, and Surgeon General Jerome
Adams all advised against wearing masks as protection against a respiratory
virus like COVID. On that day, Fauci,
the CDC, and Jerome Adams all changed their stories and demanded that we all
start wearing the damn things. There was
no new “science” and no new medical study suggesting such a thing. One of the great mysteries of the masking
madness was how it got started in the first place.
The
reason was Tufekci. She had actually accepted
the decades of research indicating no benefit to masking and had said so in an
article on February 27, 2020. Then, in a
March 17, 2020 op-ed in the New York Times, she told the world that masks were
essential to prevent infection. Supposedly,
this was the only conclusion to be drawn from recent events in the Czech
Republic where masking had prevented a COVID outbreak. This was never true, but the tall tale about
the Czech Republic became the rallying cry for the #Masks4All movement. Less than three weeks later, the public
health establishment in the U.S. did its about-face and universal masking
became the norm.
And now
she’s at it again.
On
January 30, 2023, The Cochrane Review published its summary of 78 random
control trial studies involving mask-wearing and its effect on the transmission
of respiratory viruses, concluding that masking was worthless and probably
harmful. (Random control trials are
often called the “gold standard” of medical research.) This was basically the end of any rational basis
for masking or mask mandates, though most of the support for masking was never
rooted in science anyway.
Tufekci,
however, is not ready to let us take our masks off. Armed with an ambiguous statement she had
secured from Karla Soares-Weiser, Editor of the Cochrane Report, she wrote an
op-ed for the NYT (3-10-23), entitled “Here’s Why the Science is Clear That
Masks Work.” And, at least in terms of
how all the really, really smart people think, that was the end of the Cochrane
Review and its 78 random control trial studies proving that mask-wearing is
useless. Tufekci forgot to mention in her
op-ed that she was the person who put us on the path to universal masking in
the first place, but I suppose that’s a minor point.
It is
mystifying, to me at least, how people like Jamie Gorelick and Zeynep Tufekci
can be so catastrophically wrong and yet continue to be promoted, listened to,
and even lauded by otherwise sensible people.
If there was one American official responsible for 9-11, it was
Gorelick, and yet she is now at the pinnacle of D.C. power-brokers and
influencers---nobody even checks her driver’s license anymore before putting
her in charge of some critical government agency. As for Tufekci, she wasn’t always a full
professor at Columbia. A few years ago,
she was an assistant prof at North Carolina in the School of Library
Science. Then she wrote an article in
Wired in support of censorship on
social media (you know---all that “misinformation”), and now look at her. She is the
reason you had to tie that diaper to your face for two years, and there is no
sign she is ever going away.
Copyright2023MichaelKubacki
(Note: Much of the factual information herein about Zeynep
Tufekci comes from a 3-26-23 article entitled “How Zeynep Tufekci and Jeremy
Hoard Masked America,” by investigative reporter Michael Senger. I am grateful for his work.)
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