Insight: “There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his own conscience.” —Hartley Shawcross (1902-2003)

For the record: “The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities, so these are people who were unwell to begin with.” —CDC Director Rochelle Walensky (“There have been 836,000 covid deaths in America. 75% of 836K is 627,000. This means they shut down the country, stole two years of education from children, sent thousands of businesses under, and caused mass hysteria when only 209,000 deaths weren’t people already deathly sick.” —Greg Price)

Friendly fire I: “The CDC has turned into a punchline. … There’s a huge credibility crisis for the CDC.” —CNN’s Brian Stelter

Friendly fire II: “[Democrats] have a policy problem and a messaging problem. … They thought they could vaccinate their way out of this problem. … This administration … had all the money in the world for testing, and they just didn’t focus on it. And that was a huge mistake.” —CNN panelist Paul Kane

The BIG Lie: “[Governor Ron DeSantis] has been someone who’s … not exactly [been] advocating for people in his state to get vaccinated, which we know is the way that people can be protected, ways that lives can be saved.” —White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki (“This is an easily provable lie. It takes mere minutes to find numerous instances of DeSantis advocating — ‘exactly’ — for his constituents to get vaccinations, as he did this summer at a press conference in which he said they ‘save lives.’” —David Harsanyi)

First World problems: “When the Supreme Court justices took their seats Friday morning to hear oral arguments in two cases challenging the Biden administration’s covid rules, seven of the justices wore masks — a change in their previous behavior prompted, no doubt, by the emergence of an new infectious strain. One justice, Sonia Sotomayor, who had previously been the only justice to wear a mask on the bench, participated remotely from her chambers. … Which brings me to the question: Where was [Neil] Gorsuch’s mask? … No one is the boss of Justice Gorsuch. Like his colleagues, he had a choice about whether to wear a mask. Unlike them, he chose poorly.” —Washington Post deputy editorial page editor Ruth Marcus

Non compos mentis I: “There is nothing more important for us to do than protect our Constitution and our democracy. What the Republicans are doing across the country is really a legislative continuation of what they did on January 6th, which is to undermine our democracy, to undermine the integrity of our elections, to undermine the voting power, which is the essence of a democracy. So, we have to do that bill. There is no more important bill that enables us to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” —House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

Non compos mentis II: “It’s entirely possible that when the intelligence community and the law enforcement community looks out across this mainstream, they didn’t assume [on January 6] that that group of people — business owners, white people from the suburbs, educated, employed — presented a threat of violence, and now we know very clearly that they do." —former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe

Non compos mentis III: "I can tell you from my perspective of spending a lot of time focused on the radicalization of international terrorists and Islamic extremist and extremists of all stripes … that this group shares many of the same characteristics of those groups that we’ve seen radicalized along entirely different ideological lines.” —Andrew McCabe

Indoctrination: “If people are tuning out what’s going on in cable news … they’re just, you know, ignoring everything and living their lives and we’re not really getting the information that they need to them.” —CNN’s Oliver Darcy

And last… “I think when a major news network spends a year in COVID hysteria and then suddenly gets up right after January 6th and flips to ‘oh maybe we’re out of touch and we need to not be scared of COVID,’ the midterms are calling.” —Erick Erickson