Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

Republican Representative-elect George Santos has admitted that he lied about his professional experience and educational history. No, he admitted, he never graduated from Baruch College: he never attended Baruch College or any other institution of higher learning! No, he acknowledged, he never worked at Citigroup or Goldman-Sachs. And oh, no, his grandparents did not survive the Holocaust as Ukrainian Jewish refugees from Belgium who changed their surnames. Santos explains, “Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was Jew-ish.” Unless he wrote that out, who would recognize the difference? I don’t understand that claim at all, but, oh well, whatever! As a Republican I guess he feels free to make any claim he feels like making: the wilder the lie the better the chance that it will be believed by those already inclined to believe lies. Think of the Trump minions who yet hold on to the possibility that the former President will be reinstalled in office once the fraudulent elections are discovered. And the Republican leadership remains silent.
           Now that he has been exposed, I’m waiting to hear from those who have been deceived: the voters who elected him to office under completely false pretenses. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me! First Trump now Santos. With Kari Lake squeezed into the mix. Before the first vote had been counted she claimed that if she didn’t win there had to be some fraud involved, and now insists that the courts declare her the winner even though she lost the election by 17,000 votes. Who holds onto these fantasies? And why? As for Santos, despite having lied to voters, and thus stealing an election by representing himself as he was not, Santos remarkably claimed that he “wasn’t a criminal.” He said that “To get down to the nit and gritty, I’m not a fraud

 . . . I’m not a criminal who defrauded the entire country and made up this fictional character and ran for Congress.” Well, of course he is a fraud and yes, he did make up a fictional character. He said a lot of people know him but . . . hmnn. Who is it they think they know? Nevertheless, Santos assertion raises a number of questions. When people voted for Santos they were voting for a man who represented himself to voters as a college graduate, a successful business man, and Jewish. But that isn’t the man who ran for office. He had no college degree, was not a successful business man, and had no Jewish ancestry.
           This particular incident suggests something more nefarious, I think: lying is no longer a bad thing. Telling lies has become an acceptable practice—this follows the two years of Trump and his minions promoting the Big Lie that the election which he soundly and legitimately lost and that he should be President. And that is besides the lies Trump told during his four-year reign. Lying will no longer make one’s nose grow longer, rather it opens the door to a greater deception: I don’t have to be who I am: I can be whoever I wan to be. The electorate is stupid: I’ll be anybody who can get elected. It is only lying. Trump used that lie all the way to the White House and beyond.

           And the Republican leadership remains silent.