At a press briefing this week, Fox’s Peter Doocy once again suggested with his line of questioning he is just not a serious person.
This time, he was pressuring John Kirby, who is now a communications official affiliated with the National Security Council, about work to examine the origins of COVID-19. Doocy has repeatedly run with the idea that the virus that sparked the worldwide pandemic was a lab leak, although available evidence indicates there is simply no consensus among the relevant authorities about what happened as investigative work continues. Doocy, though, seemingly wants action — action that would amount to changing the foreign policy of the U.S. towards a major competitor on the basis of an unproven suspicion, the contours of which haven’t even been fully defined. (It seems like some might try to use the idea of a lab leak to allege intentionality behind the spread of COVID-19, but those are two different things — one a possibility and the other a conspiracy theory based on who-knows-what.)
Doocy was specifically questioning the already dubious idea of a lack of substantial action from the president. “But we’ve got the FBI Director saying, ‘Most likely a potential lab incident’ in Wuhan,” Doocy said Thursday. “If a foreign country came to the United States and killed 1.1 million Americans with guns, would the President just let that slide?”
What is Doocy trying to say? Anyway, Kirby replied as follows: “Nobody is letting anything slide. That’s why the President wants the intelligence community to work so hard to — hopefully, to get to some answers that we can rely on. Right now, there’s just no consensus. It’s hard to take a look at what the President has done here — in terms of declassifying and making public information already; in terms of the constant and consistent briefings to members of Congress in a classified and unclassified setting in just recent weeks on what the origins of COVID were; and on his tasking, again, to the intelligence community to keep at that work — and come away from that thinking that he’s not taking this seriously.”
Republicans surely do seem to like their conspiracy theories, though, besides also using COVID-19 as an excuse for racism. It’s also notable to see them pick and choose when they’re mad about the impacts of COVID-19 — sometimes ignoring it all in favor of clamoring against even mild restrictions and other times trying to depict Biden as just letting hundreds of thousands of Americans preventably die. Watch Doocy below:
