Turning back to the midterms: they are over at last, but still pending the swearing-in ceremonies of the new Congress... and that may be a good thing, too, all things considered.
[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/nyregion/george-santos-ny-republicans.html[/URL]
Wow. A Republican made up of whole cloth and even at that full of holes. Hardly anything checks out in reality versus the background, CV and claims of this Long Island GOP representative-elect.
That bombshell of a report dropped on Monday and should possibly have carried a subhead like "So don't fuck with NYT investigative journos" since it uncovered more holes than facts in his CV.
Maybe we need criteria stronger than being a citizen for at least 7 years, being at least 25 years old and living in the state from which elected. The rather loose additional requirement that the House "confirm" elected members before they are sworn in suddenly seems not only vague but careless.
It's possible Mr. Santos may face at least charges of wire fraud by time authorities look into possible lawbreaking. "What can he have been thinking?" is the least of the questions really. We live in an era where audacious disregard for norms, protocol, rules, law itself seems to be gaining steam, and that arrogance needs a smackdown for sure. Some Long Island voters in that district are already saying they wouldn't have voted for him if they'd known he lied about his education and employment, never mind now having questions about his wealth and claims regarding nonprofits and investments.
[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.rawstory.com/george-santos/[/URL]
A clip from an embedded video:
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As if that were not enough, Mr. Santos was one of three incoming freshmen Republican representatives who went to a NYC Young Republicans gala event earlier this month, a gathering that featured GOP fringe extremists and drew media attention because MTG was in attendance and ran her mouth about how if she and Steve Bannon had organized the 1/6 insurrection, "we would have won, not to mention it would have been armed."
[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/14/us/politics/extremism-republicans.html[/URL]
Interesting for part of Long Island to end up with a GOP Congressman whose resumé is full of holes and whose claimed attributes include being gay, a nonobservant Jew and a Roman Catholic, while now also apparently an aficionado of white nationalist gatherings. He has not commented on refutations of his additional claim that his grandparents fled the Holocaust when it appears that both were born in Brazil rather than emigrating there from Europe. A prior generation had Belgian roots. About 20% of the district he campaigned in is Jewish, so the murkiness of his claims regarding ancestry is not going over too well in that community. There's just enough plausibility in Santos' general assertions about the religiously oriented circumstances of his Brazilian ancestry to pass muster unless someone looks into the specifics.... which, of course, journalists for a number of media outlets have done.
[URL unfurl="true"]https://forward.com/news/529130/george-santos-jewish-lie-genealogy-records/[/URL]
