George Santos is unbelievable. And that’s no exaggeration.
Though folks routinely use the word “unbelievable” to refer to all sorts of things that are real and factual — a stunning comeback in a football game, a freakish storm, a brilliant musical performance — in the case of Santos, the lying congressman from Long Island, the word applies perfectly. And will in all truth likely be increasingly applicable over time as more is learned about the U.S. representative’s myriad prevarications.
The list of untruths on his fabulist resume is so long that one barely knows where to begin. There’s perhaps even reason to wonder if the congressman’s name if actually George Santos. Truly.
It appears that Santos fabricated his education, his work history, his ethnicity, his finances, his charitable giving and more. Unbelievable, isn’t it?
In one way, it’s the perfect distillation of our era, when a great many folks talk of telling “my truth” instead of “the truth.” It brings to mind a famous statement made by the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a four-term senator from New York state: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
If only folks still believed that today.
With Republicans holding the slimmest majority in the House, party leadership could well be loathe to toss Santos overboard. Because even a lying representative with an “R” after his name will be a vote that the GOP can likely count on. And when party comes first and foremost, as it does for so many in our hyper-partisan time, few can be bothered to fret about such old-fashioned niceties as the truth.
One would like to think that House Republican leadership would see Santos as an embarrassment and take steps to boot him from office. If he stays, he’ll serve mostly as a distraction. And a punchline.
Santos claimed to have attended the elite Horace Mann prep school, but there’s no record that he did. He also claimed to have graduated from Baruch College in 2010 and to have spent some time at New York University, though neither appears to be true. Nor did he ever work at Citigroup or at Goldman Sachs, as he also claimed.
There’s one statement Santos can make that’s completely verifiable, though, at least for the moment: He can truthfully assert that he is a member of the U.S. Congress. How sad.
— Tribune News Service
