On a beautiful sunny day back in the mid-80s, I pummeled a little girl named Mary next to our elementary school's playground slide.
That day, I learned a lesson thesenior senator from the great state of Ohio apparently missed.
There was no reason for my completely unprovoked attack on Mary. I loved her. She was my good friend.
We were both strange birds who chirped to the beats of our own drums. We were both routinely picked on by bigger and badder kids. We were both shaped by what happened that day on that playground.
I immediately felt terrible. I apologized when we were kids and years later in our early 20s when I ran into Mary.
I was the aggressor that day for a reason
I still can't explain - perhaps a drive to experience the world from the mean side, but I wasn't destined to be a lifelong bully. I realized by age 10 that acting like one lessened me, making me the fool.
What my childhood lesson has to do with Anthony Fauci
We both hail from the Cleveland area, but Sen. Bernie Moreno clearly didn't have the same teachers.
"Who the f--k do you think you were for doing that?" Moreno asked former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci July 29. He was referring to Fauci's COVID-era recommendation to wear face masks and maintain at least 6 feet of distance between people.
Perhaps Moreno was trying to unseat Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Urbana, as Ohio's rudest member of Congress. Perhaps Moreno, a Colombian immigrant who is staunchly against birthright citizenship, thought he sounded tough: bigger or badder.
He didn't.
Instead, he once again embarrassed Ohio with crassness you'd expect in a dive bar, not Congress.
Moreno diminished himself and his office during the Senate committee witch hunt designed to make Americans forget what really happened during COVID.
Kill the Fauci. I think I hear Elmer Fudd.
While President Donald Trump, Fauci's then boss, mind you, wondered if injections of disinfectantslike bleach could be used to cure the disease that took 697,000 American lives between March 2020 and October 2021, Fauci and other scientists used research to slow the spread.
That work − as annoying as historical revisionists still find it six years later − continues to save real lives.
Moreno, of course, doesn't have to agree with the truth or facts, and as a senator, had every right to question Fauci.
Doing what's right matters
But just as I had no right to put my hands on Mary as a little kid, Bernie Moreno had no right to curse out Dr. Anthony Fauci before God and country.
Would Sen. Jon Husted or former senators Sherrod Brown, Rob Portman or Mike DeWine go that gutter?
I doubt Jordan would even drop an F-bomb during a hearing.
He could, as he did, call Fauci a "megalomaniac" and label leaders who agreed with him "moronic politicians." He could also, as he did, call him a disgrace to this country.
That doesn't make it right or behavior befitting a representative of this fantastic state.
As most grade school kids can tell you, "could" isn't the same as "should," and "right" is the opposite of "wrong."
Moreno wasn't the only bully at the hearing.
Other GOP senators, notably Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky,took their verbal licks, berating Fauci during a three-hour (fill in the blank) show that saw Fauci invoke his Fifth Amendment right more than 100 times.
I don't know who the f--- they thought they were, but they looked and sounded like absolute fools.
I apologized to Mary for what I did to her when we were 10.
Moreno and other members of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee should apologize to the American people for their contemptible behavior, attacks on reason and insults of our intelligence.
Sadly, no rational person is holding their breath, just like no rational person injected bleach in their veins.
Amelia Robinson is the Columbus Dispatch opinion and community engagement editor.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: F-bomb shows Bernie Moreno is deeper in the gutter than even Jim Jordan | Opinion
