Call it a grand finale by the outgoing US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on seeing his time in office fast disappearing. But he has been unwilling to go quietly. Instead, he has taken every chance available to continue his bad-mouthing of China.

Over the past several days, Pompeo has been on a tweeting spree that, apart from touting his and his boss' accomplishments and bashing old bête noires of the US such as Iran and Cuba, has made China the main target of attack. Of the more than 30 tweets that he posted on Saturday, all but a few denigrated China.

It shows how desperately Pompeo is trying to derail Sino-US ties and create trouble for the incoming Joe Biden administration.

The ideologically driven hatred against a country that he sees as an archrival of the US in a zero-sum game has made Pompeo a hysterical performer in a self-orchestrated anti-China play. Yet he will be disappointed if he hoped people would be hoodwinked by his incendiary words, since few, except for the outgoing president's most fervent cultists, seem ready to buy the smears he has uttered so many times.

In one of his tweets he harped on the old tune that "the Chinese government unleashed a virus on the world", despite the fact that China has contributed greatly to the global fight against the novel coronavirus — by sharing its genome sequence with the World Health Organization and making the vaccines its scientists have developed global public goods.

But Pompeo is adept at lying and deceiving — once, in a rare moment of honesty, he prided himself on his activities as former chief of the Central Intelligence Agency by admitting that "We lied, we cheated, we stole". But his lies, no matter how many times he repeats them, remain lies, and more and more people have seen through his tricks. The mud he is slinging at China is boomeranging to soil his own credibility.

Given his not so glorious track record, he has been dubbed "Pinocchio Pompeo" by the US media. As columnist Max Boot wrote in The Washington Post, "There is not enough space in this newspaper to chronicle all of Pompeo's falsehoods".

Luckily the final curtain will soon fall for the show staged by this tawdry anti-China bigot. Although he no doubt hopes his anti-China flurries will stand him in good stead in four years' time. They in fact only cement his reputation of being one of the worst secretaries of state in US diplomatic history.