George Santos is a Republican congressman-elect from New York representing the 3rd District and is preparing to be sworn into the US House of Representatives. However, so much is coming out about his background that indicates that much of the biography he used during the campaign appears to be made up. There is too much to go into, but there are questions about his education, residences, family, religion, and sexual orientation.
So now the Democrats in Congress, especially the House, where the Republicans will now have a thin majority, are demanding that Santos resign, that there be investigations, that crimes may have been committed. For the mainstream media, predictably, it is a full-scale feeding frenzy.
I will not attempt to defend Santos here. I saw his Fox News interview with Tulsi Gabbard, and, frankly, he came across to me as a flim-flam man. As to the specific allegations, I only know what I read and hear on the news, so I have no opinion except to ask a basic question:
First of all, is it a crime for a candidate to make stuff up about himself in a campaign? If it is, you could indict about 9/10s of Congress. We have a senator in Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal (D), who lied about serving in the US military in Vietnam. The voters of Connecticut don't seem to be bothered by that because they keep re-electing him.
Then there are all the tall tales told by former vice president and failed presidential candidate Al Gore. Remember his having invented the internet? Or his line about him and his ex-wife being the models for the movie, "Love Story"? Or his supposed involvement in "finding" Love Canal (toxic waste disaster in New York State, 1970s)?
What about Joe Biden? How many of those, "I'm the guy who (fill in the blank) can we drag up? He claimed to have personally visited the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh after it was the scene of a mass murder in 2018. He never did. He claimed to have been arrested in South Africa while trying to meet with then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela. That was false. He has lied about his academic achievements in college and law school. I could go on and on, but we all know who Joe Biden is.
Then there is Katie Porter (D-CA). Remember in 2019 when she was mercilessly grilling the CEO of JP Morgan while he was testifying before Congress and told him about a poor JP Morgan employee in her district whose salary was so low she couldn't provide for her family as a single mom. Her name was "Patricia". Boy did she make that JP Morgan CEO squirm. Except there was no Patricia. Katie had made her up. By the way, Katie is back in the news this week over allegations of mistreating a former member of her staff. None of this matters to the voters in her Orange County district because she has been re-elected twice now.
I could go on all day, but the point is made. Congress is full of liars who could give Santos a run for his money any day of the week. If Santos has violated some law by submitting false papers for his candidacy, fine, charge him. Whether he resigns is of no consequence to me. But when it comes to the question of honesty in Congress, specifically as to telling the public lies about your life story, let's not be hypocrites here.
11 comments:
Okay, you have some legit points here, but you lose me with the "Al Gore said he invented the internet."
No he didn't. The real lie is that he supposedly said that. How many times does this need to be debunked?
In May of 1999, Gore told CNN's Wolf Blitzer, "During my service in the U.S. Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
If you want to split hairs, fine, but this was at best, a misleading statement. Was it a careless mistatement or a carefully crafted statement designed to mislead dumb voters? Take your pick.
This isn't "splitting hairs". This is debunking a lie.
Saying that Al Gore claimed to have "invented the internet" is a lie, plain and simple.
And if you're going to quote him, use the full quote. "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system."
This isn't even a misstatement. It's true.
I looked into another one of these supposed "lies". The one where Biden supposedly lied about being "arrested" in South Africa? Well, he was detained by the police there. Yeah, "arrested" isn't the right word for it, but unlike the Gore one, you can at least qualify it as a misstatement.
I have neither the time nor the inclination to look up each and every one of these claims. However, let's get to the heart of the matter - and that's that you're engaging in pure "whataboutism" propaganda.
Santos has completely invented education, work experience, and family history out of whole cloth. That's very different from a misstatement.
It's like this. Let's say two guys claim that they caught a fish that was four feet long. Turns out that one of them actually caught one that was two feet long. That's what you have with Biden's "arrest" claim (and his overstating his educational achievements - I checked into that one too.)
With the other guy, it turns out that he's never been fishing in his life. He hasn't even ever gone to the store to buy a fish. He's never even opened up a can of tuna.
Can we categorize both as a type of "lie"? Sure. Just like murder and stealing a pack of gum are both "crime". But if you were to arrest a murderer and he pointed out the pack of gum you stole as being some kind of equivalent, nobody would take him seriously.
The irony of all this, of course, is that you're trying to write a piece on the importance of honesty. But some of these comparisons are completely dishonest. (The one about Gore is especially bad, considering that he wasn't lying at all.)
I do see dishonesty coming from both sides, but today's "conservatives" are so completely devoid of any sense of objective reality that Santos is simply an unsurprising byproduct of the culture that embraced Donald Trump - a grifter whose lies stretch from here to Pluto. I mean, look at Herschel Walker. Yeah, he didn't win, but that guy made claims that were even goofier than anything Santos ever said, and he almost won!
Today's conservatives are so neck-deep in a sea of lies that they not only can't distinguish a lie from a misstatement, they'll embrace a lie about something being a lie!
And the saddest part about this? I reckon that eventually you will continue to talk about Gore's supposed claim that he invented the internet. (Because I honestly can't believe that this hasn't been pointed out to you before.)
Good grief! I can't believe you are expending all this energy and time to my humble little site.
Did you skip over the part where I called Santos a flim-flam man?
Yes. And then you compared his lies to things that were not even comparable. Sad!
Cheer up!
It's always a sign that I'm winning an argument when the other person won't even attempt to address the point.
So, I will cheerfully take my victory lap.
That wasn't the main point.
My point is: in a post where you're trying to show that there are equivalent lies amongst Democrats to the lies of George Santos, you included examples (not just that one) that aren't even close to being the same.
In other words, in a post about dishonesty, you're being dishonest.
My main point was questioning how Santos could be forced out of Congress considering all the liars currently in Congress. Aside from Gore, I also mentioned Blumenthal and Biden. Do you want to defend them too?
Yes. I know. And many of the "lies" aren't even remotely comparable.
Why is this so hard for you?
Not comparable? That's highly debatable. Maybe that's why it's "so hard for me".
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