George Santos speaks the truth!
I’m not gonna lie. It was another bad week for the Great Prevaricator, Rep. George Santos.
The New York Republican sat for a long interview with British broadcaster Piers Morgan and attempted to validate his previous lies — by serving up a batch of new ones. Santos lied about his lie about his religion: “I never claimed to be Jewish.” (He did, many times.) He supplemented this with a lie about a speech he gave to the Republican Jewish Coalition, claiming “people were hysterically laughing” at his joke about being “Jew-ish.” (A recording shows there was no such joke, and no such laughter.)
Worse, Santos complained about Jews and others offended by his bogus Judaism claims and his false story about his family fleeing the Holocaust. “Now that everybody’s canceling me, everybody’s pounding down for a pound of flesh,” he protested.
Yes, “pound of flesh” comes from Shylock, the greedy Jew in Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice.” Oy gevalt.
But the interview offered some insight into the fabulist’s strategy for political survival — and why it may resonate with some in the MAGA crowd. True story: Santos claims he is the victim. His lies are everybody else’s fault — honest!
This politics of victimhood, of course, is the essence of Donald Trump (who could, and did, claim it was sunny when it was raining). Trump loved to complain about how unfairly he was treated by the fake news media, about the witch hunts and the hoaxes — and many Republicans believed it. Naturally, the technique has filtered down to the rank and file. Where once there was shame, there is now only grievance directed at imagined conspiracies of dark forces.
Santos, the Long Island liar blamed unnamed others for financial irregularities at his bogus petrescue charity. He blamed Portuguese translators for his nonsensical claim that he survived an assassination attempt. He suggested that unknown others framed him 12 years ago by setting up a Wikipedia page attributing to him a successful drag and acting career. “I have to sit down and endure people say(ing) things about me that are absolutely not true,” Santos protested.
People saying untrue things? The nerve!
He complained about his “uncomfortable” fame. “I can’t stand it,” said the guy who came early to snag a center-aisle seat at the State of the Union.
Yet there was one thing Santos said that rang true to me. “If the media put the equal amount of efforts and resources,” he said, “on all 435 members of the House and 100 members of the Senate, I think the American people would have more clarity of who represents them in Congress.”
I agree. The vast majority of House members come from safe districts where they are chosen by a tiny fraction of the electorate working from scant information. They never get a proper vetting because the parties can’t be bothered and local media has been decimated.
Since the Santos revelations, The Washington Post’s Jacqueline Alemany and Alice Crites identified several holes in biographical claims by freshman Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), and Tennessee’s NewsChannel 5 found discrepancies in the résumé of freshman
Rep. Andrew Ogles (R-Tenn.). Like Santos, both lawmakers played the victim, claiming persecution by leftists.
How many others faked their way to high office with bogus claims or have backgrounds and associations that wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny in the light of day? Maybe that’s why so many of Santos’s Republican colleagues refuse to expel this fraud.
On Feb. 15, the gunman who killed 10 Black people in a racist massacre at a Buffalo supermarket last May was sentenced to life in prison. The killer had subscribed to the racist “great replacement theory” that White people are being deliberately sidelined and endangered.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee marked this solemn occasion in a most unusual way. On the same day the killer was sentenced, the panel held a border field hearing in Texas and hosted as one of its witnesses a proponent of the very same great replacement theory.
The witness, National Border Patrol Council union President Brandon Judd, alleged on Fox News last year that the Biden administration had opened the southern border (itself a falsehood) because “they’re trying to change the demographics of the electorate” to “stay in power.” That’s the great replacement theory in a nutshell. Judd has a history with far-right anti-immigration groups, and he argued that governors should be “declaring an invasion” at the border.
Judd did not disappoint, alleging that “Biden’s open-border policies” have “made the securing of our border impossible.” And he testified that “we are constantly seizing backpacks filled with fentanyl” from migrants illegally crossing the border. In reality, the vast majority of fentanyl is imported at legal ports of entry, often by U.S. citizens, and smugglers’ chances of getting caught are much higher if they cross illegally. But it’s so much scarier to conjure images of Brown people smuggling opioid-laden backpacks.