Can’t make this stuff up

Um, apparently you can

This is so bizarre that surely somebody will make a film about it one day. Or a really bad made-for-TV mini-series.

This George Santos guy is something else. Or so he says. He’s something over there, then something else over there, then something completely different over there.

Any politician who says he’s never stretched the truth a little is no doubt stretching the truth. Whether it’s a candidate embellishing his resume, or taking credit for enacting a bill he opposed, it happens all the time. But this George Santos politician/ con-man lied more than is strictly necessary (to copy a headline from a recent New York Times offering).

The story of George Santos goes beyond anything we’ve ever heard. His path to Congress was an all-out assault on the truth, and its cousin, reality. The people of his New York district elected a man who essentially doesn’t exist.

He finally paid the price for his blatant falsehoods when he was expelled from Congress by his colleagues (311 to 114) with nearly half of his own (Republican) party voting to send him packing, making him only the sixth House member in U.S. history to suffer such a fate.

Mr. Santos’ reaction? As if to try to convince the world that he’d been treated unfairly during his 10-month career in Congress, he said, “to hell with this place.” The place he’s talking about is a beleaguered institution—that he did as much as anyone in recent American history to beleaguer.

Of all the victims in this ugly episode of American politics, Mr. Santos is not one of them.

Among his lies were his claims of being a star volleyball player at Baruch College, an institution that says it has no record of his attending. He told voters he’d worked for both Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, yet there’s no record of that either. He falsified financial records, claimed to be Jew-“ish,” whatever that means. He said his family survived the Holocaust, but again, no proof. It seems his family is Catholic, and came to this country many years ago from Brazil.

He said he was mugged in broad daylight in Manhattan and that he’d received death threats and that his house had been vandalized, none of which can be backed up by police or any other records.

He lied about where he went to high school. He apparently made up companies that he founded. According to the New Yorker, he lied about founding an animal charity. The New York Times found out that he claimed to have lost employees in the Pulse nightclub shooting, but none of the victims at that club in Orlando worked at any kind of company that George Santos ever claimed to have owned.

Goodness.

The House Ethics Committee report was released in mid-November and marked the end of the beginning of this Republican’s short political career. In early December, he’d officially been sent home.

(The report also included revelations that he’d used a campaign donor’s credit card and other contributions for personal expenses such as botox treatments, Internet subscriptions and lavish first-class airfares and hotel stays. And let’s not forget the numerous campaign finance reports that included items just under the dollar threshold to trigger a description of what the expense went toward.)

The lack of remorse shown by Mr. Santos might be warranted if this episode was a political witch hunt, but that would be a wholly inaccurate characterization of the investigation and expulsion.

George Santos is a fraud.

It’s hard to congratulate an outfit for simply doing the right thing, but we’ll congratulate Congress on this matter anyway. Believe it, or not, Congress did the right thing.

It should, at the least, get good PR from that soon-to-be really bad TV mini-series.

Incidentally—which is what Richard Nixon used to say when he meant just the opposite—the “major” news media types in New York (New York!) didn’t break the news about George Santos. He was already elected and in Congress before the major papers and TV stations and all the new media in New York finally got around to calling this guy’s many bluffs.

The North Shore Leader is a small publication on Long Island, and was ringing the alarms on Candidate George Santos early on. And when the election came near, it editorialized for the Democrat opponent running against Mr. Santos: “This newspaper would like to endorse a Republican,” it wrote, but Santos “is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot,” adding, “He boasts like an insecure child—but he’s most likely just a fabulist—a fake.”

This shows the importance of local news. Or as a big newspaper like The Washington Post put it, quoting a journalism professor at Northwestern:

“Just as good beat cops can help keep a neighborhood safer, the presence of local journalists helps to keep our politics more honest and our government more accountable.”

The professor predicts that “if we don’t fix the crisis in local news, we’re going to see more George Santos-type cases and instances of politicians going unchecked.”

And that’s the way it is. (Cronkite, W.)