(Opinion) The only thing sure about George Santos is that he has been elected to the US Congress as a Republican congressman representing New York’s 3rd Congressional District, tipping the district from its traditional democratic majority. Everything else about him may or may not be true.
Whether or not the New York GOP who put him forward as their candidate was aware of his questionable background is an open guess.
It’s obvious the voters who elected him to congress hadn’t done their homework or didn’t care when they found him to be a fraud. They were both obviously negligent in focusing on the lipstick and not seeing the pig.
As set out in the Constitution, until a ‘speaker’ is chosen by winning a majority of the members of congress, no government business can be conducted.
That means, in practice that nothing can be done. And that’s precisely what has happened for the past week.
We have only to watch votes for the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the third most important post in the US political hierarchy, to understand the dysfunction of the US political system, with its abandonment of the truth in favor of raw power.
One has only to watch the ‘shit show’ in which a handful of ‘chaos caucus’ members have held the majority hostage to their wishes.
It has not been a pretty sight.
Santos has cast his vote on fifteen ballots to crown Kevin McCarthy the new Speaker and put in his hand the prized symbolic gavel, something McCarthy has spent his career fighting for, something for which he has demonstrated no foundational beliefs and a troubling lack of consistency or honesty.
One might reasonably ask how Santos, an admitted and unadulterated liar whose background is shrouded in the thick fog of untruths, could be elected to congress despite his admitted fabrications.
He has also been unclear about his citizenship which raises the legal question of whether he could legitimately serve in the House.
He has claimed to have earned degrees from Baruch College and New York University. When queried, both schools had never heard of him, and he subsequently admitted to the New York Post that he hadn’t earned the degrees at all.
He had claimed that he worked for Citigroup or Goldman Sachs and had to retract that claim when these firms said it was untrue.
He has claimed that his mother was in the World Trade Center on 9/11 and walked out just in time, but there is no evidence to support this.
The list of his falsehoods goes on and on.
Santos calls these lies about his background ‘embellishments’. ‘Embellishments’ they may be, but they did not prevent him from casting votes in the serious election for a Speaker.
“I will fight to preserve the American dream” wrote Santos on his campaign literature. “I am a walking example of the American Dream.”
Is Santos’ version of the American dream our nightmare of disfunction and untruth? Is he nothing more than a cosmetically enhanced pig?
]The answer goes to the heart of the culture in which we find ourselves.
The Hill put ‘George Santos lies’ into Google and got a startling 51 million hits, surpassing even Donald Trump, who came up with only 34 million.
”We have become so accustomed to this culture of dishonesty that almost anything has become tolerable. Why wasn’t Gorge Santos kicked out of a congressional seat he had no legitimate right to occupy?
Was it because Kevin McCarthy needed every vote he could muster, and he wasn’t inclined to care where they came from?
A disturbingly large percentage of voters seem comfortable with the ‘big lie’ that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and the wild fabrications about a ‘deep state’ controlling our government and our lives.
With that as the backdrop, why should we be concerned with George Santos’ fabrications?
In fact: why should any of us feel the need to tell the truth?
The answer is that truth is the glue that holds our society together. It is expressed in many different ways from a handshake to a multi-page formal legal agreement.
Absent truth and our society is certain to irretrievably break down. We have to have faith in the basic honesty of our friends and colleagues to make society work.
The story of George Washington’s cherry tree is basic to what we teach our kids and what we want them to take away. Would we want our children to learn about George Santos instead?