George Santos makes George Costanza look honest
George Santos, the Republican congressman who won that office by lying to voters about nearly every aspect of his life, is making the media rounds, where he’s in high demand because he’s an infamous liar. He’s been “explaining” how he’s not really a liar, but also how he somehow had no choice but to lie about graduating from Baruch (where he also lied about being a star volleyball player) and NYU’s business school (where he also lied about graduating without any debt, which is much easier to do when you don’t actually enroll) because “I would never have gotten the nomination from Nassau County GOP if I had not concluded college” — which he didn’t!
That’s quite an alibi: I only lied because it was in my interests.
Speaking as a fellow high school dropout (albeit one who did eventually graduate from college), Santos can pound sand.
And indeed he is, shamelessly digging himself in deeper and deeper, secure in the knowledge that he has a safe place for now in spineless Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s Republican caucus, pending the results of at least five different law enforcement probes in two countries, and in the knowledge that he has nothing to lose at this point by pushing forward and further upping his name recognition to lie about why he lied.
“To say that I deceived, and [ran] a campaign of deception is just not fair,” the not-so-talented Mr. Ripley — who lied about being a successful businessman, lied about being a savior of dogs without homes, lied about being raised “Jew-ish” in a family supposedly including Holocaust survivors, lied about his mother fleeing the World Trade Center on 9/11 and then dying from cancer as a result, and lied about damn near anything else you can think of — told Newsmax. “That’s just political spin.”
What chutzpah! House Republicans’ decision to cling to this liar, who 78% of voters in his district, including 71% of Republicans, say should resign, eliminates any remaining doubt that the national party that nominated Donald Trump still lacks the integrity or strength to police its own ranks.
(The Nassau GOP, by the way, is now calling for the candidate they backed in two runs for Congress, without ever vetting, to resign.)
Meantime, New York Reps. Ritchie
Torres and Dan Goldman, who’ve piggybacked off of Santos’ infamy to boost their own name recognition, are among the Democrats pushing a vote to expel him from Congress.
(While Santos made up a past as a successful businessman and used his Devolder Corp. to hide money that other, still unknown people gave to his winning campaign for an open House seat in Long island and Queens, Goldman did his best to obscure the fact that he’s an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune who really did put millions into his own winning campaign for an open House seat covering downtown and Brooklyn).
The expulsion vote push is a smart political play for Democrats, to tie this committed liar around the neck of a national party whose leadership can’t afford to let him go, and to force Republicans to take an on-the-record vote about this liar, albeit one that will surely fall short of the two-thirds of the House needed to actually expel him.
But the idea that Congress should be in the business of litigating lies and overturning elections on that basis is a bridge too far.
As the Daily News editorial page noted, “Only five members have been kicked out of the House in its 234 years. Three of them were Confederate traitors. The fourth and fifth were convicted of federal corruption charges, and removed only after the felony verdicts came in.”
“I’ve worked my entire life, I’ve lived an honest life,” Santos said in a typically bizarre and pathetic interview last month in which he had no answers to teed-up softball questions from fellow GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz about where the money he supposedly gave to his campaign from his made-up business fortune actually came from.
“I’ve never been accused, sued, of any sort of bad doing. It’s the equity of my hardworking self that I’ve invested inside of me.”
One hundred and seventy years after Karl Marx wrote about history and its leading characters repeating themselves, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce,” the Hegelian dialectic is running in reverse now, away from sense or synthesis and toward the yada yada.
The farce of George Costanza’s fictional Vandelay Industries and Art Vandelay alter ego preceded by 30 years the tragedy of a GOP that can’t quit George Santos and his fraudulent Devolder Organization and Anthony Devolder alter ego, as voters look to be stuck with this idiotic, unrepentant liar for the next two years.