Opinion | The Deborah Birx dilemma is a lesson for the ages - The Washington Post - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...h-birxs-dilemma-is-lesson-ages
dilemma moral appeasement collaboration complicity trump crisis pandemic politics
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Birx doesn’t deserve our pardon, but it’s worth trying to understand the essential choice she made. In fact, “Birx’s Dilemma” ought to be taught in public policy schools until the end of time.
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Birx isn’t one of the political hacks who did Trump’s bidding until it was time to save her reputation by making an empty show of principle.
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No, Birx is a retired Army colonel and respected doctor who made a tangible difference in the global fight against AIDS. As Trump’s White House coordinator for the pandemic response, she worked tirelessly to get the coronavirus under control — no one disputes that.
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She was put in an impossible predicament, something Birx has been vocal about since she left the White House, most recently in a much-hyped CNN interview with Sanjay Gupta that aired this past weekend.
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unlike Fauci, who stumbled more than once but managed to stay truthful enough to get himself ostracized by Team Trump, Birx practiced some impressive moral yoga in her defense of the president’s response.
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Birx operated on the same premise that many others in senior roles, including career soldiers such as former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly and onetime national security adviser H.R. McMaster, accepted as well.
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She apparently woke up every morning believing it was nobler to try to manage an ignorant, mercurial president than it was to speak out publicly and risk losing all influence.
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She no doubt told herself she had an obligation, as a policy expert, to do whatever she could to protect Americans from the administration’s abject incompetence. And if that meant she had to echo untruths and offer up a bunch of silly praise, so be it.
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This was Birx’s dilemma: to work within the system and maybe mitigate the tragedy, or to say what she knew and resign herself to powerlessness.
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What we do know is that, by tempering her remarks, Birx enabled and amplified Trump’s lies — that the virus was a media creation, that reopening the economy wasn’t dangerous, that the government had things under control.
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the larger lesson here — as though we should have to learn it again — is that appeasement never works.
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It doesn’t work for nations facing down aggressors. It doesn’t work for a political party that’s been taken over by a nativist bully. And it doesn’t work when you’re serving a president who demands unyielding loyalty and a willful disregard for the truth.