The Pointless Purgatory of George Santos

Sometimes you need to sacrifice a virgin to save the village. But good luck with that.

We found a dishonest member of Congress (Photograph: Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters

“Sometimes there's a man... I won't say a hero, 'cause, what's a hero? But sometimes, there's a man. And I'm talkin' about the Dude here. Sometimes, there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place. He fits right in there.” — The Stranger, The Big Lebowski

---

When people say members of Congress are frauds, sometimes it is because they (people) are lazy and cynical, and it’s just easier to sound smart when you say all politicians lie than when you say your preferred politicians don’t. And sometimes it is because members of Congress are frauds. 

I don’t want to put too fine a point on this. The fact is there are many fine people who serve in Congress. They are as honest as the legislative process allows them to be. But they all serve up a version of, “This is not about me, this is about you, dear citizen.” And that is a lie.

I once asked a Congressman, an affable gent, why he chose to run. We were on a bus trip to Philadelphia for a healthcare event, and he had spent the better part of a half-hour explaining why someone would have to be nuts to join Congress — the endless fundraising, the idiots you have to pretend to take seriously etc. So it seemed reasonable to wonder why he would put himself through it. 

“Well,” I recall him saying, “I looked around my district and realized there wasn’t a single person there who I wanted making decisions for me, except my wife — and even with her I wasn’t so sure.” That’s what the truth actually sounds like.

He later became Governor.

A lot of the lying in politics is pretty benign stuff, like telling voters and the wider public things they want to hear instead of things that are actually true. Or just putting on a performance that is designed to obscure a reality.

Someone once figured out that the public doesn’t like members of Congress voting themselves pay raises. So the rules were changed to make them automatic. That way, when John Q. Public accused them of hiking their own pay, they could say, “I couldn’t prevent it. It was automated. I wish there was a charity that would take it, or that I could use the extra six grand to help pay down the multi-trillion-dollar debt.” 

And when someone would point out they could do both those things, they would say, “That’s interesting. Could you talk with my staff?”

Problem is, they could stop it, or at least try to. They could introduce a bill. The bill would say “no raise this year.” Members who didn’t want the money could vote for that, or co-sponsor it, and everyone else could oppose the bill or say they would. 

This led eventually to an hilarious pantomime in which members pretended not to want more money while trying desperately to prevent other members from making them prove it. Which doesn’t always work out. So members usually have to come out against their own pay raises while insisting they never wanted them in the first place. There has not been a Congressional pay hike since 2009.

As I said, mostly benign stuff. When I first started in journalism I worked for a news service that provided reporting from Washington for regional newspapers. These were usually local outlets, some of them quite small and remote, in places like Oklahoma or Maine or Wisconsin. 

An editor at one of these papers would occasionally phone me up, and the conversation would go something like this:

EDITOR: Ethan, Representative Donkey’s press secretary called. Why are you refusing to write about the millions of dollars in funding the Congressman got for the Palookaville rail crossing? 

ME: Because there is no funding. The project cleared a procedural vote at an authorizing subcommittee. Claiming the money is on the way is like saying you’ve reached your road-trip destination because there’s air in your tires.

EDITOR: Sounds important. Write it up.

I could go on, but you get the point. A certain amount of low-grade dishonesty is just part of playing the game on Capitol Hill. Voters seem to recognize this, but reward it. They tend to regard legislators as problem souls who have no real identity outside of ambition, and so are content to let them dishonor themselves if that’s what they’re willing to do for the job.

A very recent Gallup poll finds that only telemarketers have a lower reputation honesty and ethics than members of Congress, and the question must be what telemarketers ever did to get such a bad rap.

Washington is often called “Hollywood for ugly people.” What’s true is that it draws in a lot of people with screenplays that they also plan to star in and direct. The real problem with the political game is that it attracts game-players who think they have it all figured out and can maybe win. A lot of these are really just smooth criminals who have mastered the pose, which is basically a performance of affinity and resolve that often gets mistaken for competence.

For me, something like an apogee was reached with former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, the plaintiffs-lawyer-turned-sincerity-mannequin who found his way onto the Democrats’ 2004 presidential ticket alongside John Kerry. (This was maybe the closest we’ve ever come to a nuclear-level explosion caused by concentrated superciliousness.) 

Edwards scored high on presentation. But he was also so clearly a phony — the syrupy self-mythologizing, the gimcrack populist can-do-itiveness — that you wondered when the edifice might crumble and a snarling goblin would leap from the ruin. If you were a Democrat, the only plausible answer to the question “Is this guy for real?” was “No, but go with it.”

Staffers I really respected on Capitol Hill were fans of his. What were they seeing? I mean, what were they seeing beyond the image of someone who knew the game and could play it? Nothing. They thought he was probably a phony, too. But they thought he could win.

It is hard to escape the impression that the political parties and the fanatics who put their faith in them want fakers, basically store-window prophets and self-animated action figures who can put on a convincing act. Yes, everyone makes a big deal about the importance of the truth and all that. But when you believe you own the truth — and if political parties produce nothing else, they produce certitude — you’re really just looking for warrior-salesmen.

You know, men like Matt Gaetz.

There’s a conversation to be had about whether lying is actually necessary in politics, since there is a a question about whether we voters would actually tolerate the truth. (The election of Donald Trump suggested that voters may claim to want a statesman, but really just want a golem that will attack the right villages.) 

The early-stage presidential debate is hardly more than an earnest mimicry pageant where maybe a dozen plastic figures wax and maneuver through a midwit obstacle course, the goal being to replicate the hologram image of presidentialness while not seeming interchangeable with the alternatives. I think the point here is that there is an archetype you are supposed to match and it can’t possibly match who you actually are. Unless you are a zombie.

Congress itself is a plastic formation at this point in its evolution, a hollow place. Even people who think Congress has crucial responsibilities (it does) have to admit it is now largely just a backdrop for tribal warfare, a platform for cranks and grandstanders hoping to build up credit with partisan audiences. Policy debates are largely symbolic and purposely divisive. A lot of hearings are just orchestrated witch burnings intended to produce viral moments.

Politics is treated as entertainment now, so politicians are more or less actors. It is just about unimaginable that today’s lawmakers could make progress on anything big or important (i.e. entitlements), or do much of anything that isn’t intended to win the next news cycle or burnish the partisan bona fides of members trying to move on to even bigger things. 

And in any case, the core function of Congress — making the laws — is now largely farmed out to administrative agencies and the courts.

When people stand for the honor of Congress, I usually wonder what kind of game they’re trying to play. Yeah, I wish Congress was the North Texas Ladies Temperance Union, too, and not a high-rent casino with a voting machine in it. But here we are. It’s a Potemkin parliament.

With this is mind, the only appropriate response to learning that a fraud has been elected to the Congress is: compared to what?

I mean, I get it. Newly-minted Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) is an impostor, a charlatan who has no business serving in Congress or maybe anywhere else, and should certainly never be given access to any classified information. (In fact, the lies may be the least of his problems.) His entire biography, the one he sold to voters, appears to be fiction. 

He never worked at Goldman Sachs, nor did he work for Citigroup. He did not attend Baruch College, nor graduate from Baruch in 2010. Nor did he play volleyball for Baruch. He does not own domestic real estate, let alone “13 properties,” and no tenants failed to pay rent on the properties he falsely claimed to own. He is not Jewish; his grandparents did not flee the Holocaust. His mother was not killed on or as a result of 9/11. 

Some have cast doubt on whether Santos is even gay, as he claims. The evidence strongly suggests that he is. But when you’ve told as many lies as Santos has, you even risk being outed as straight.

I even get why he makes a lot of people pretty mad. Keeping politicians honest is a full-time job for some and at least a part-time job for politicians. Politicians understand their careers and fortunes are in some way tied up with the impression that they are honest and trustworthy. 

That this happens so often not to be true is a detail that makes it harder to do the work they are hired to do, or at least to be convincing in the doing of it.

But the time to vindicate the honor of Congress is not when the obvious impostor appears at the doorstep but when you see the institution being defiled and diminished by the very real people who serve there.

Predictably, the response to Santos has been for a lot of members of Congress and the media to pose as Judge Smails protecting the honor of Bushwood.

“My new co-worker George Santos is a distraction and a danger to democracy,” reads the headline atop a piece for NBC News this week by Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.). Subhead: “I know what it’s like to have the neighborhood you love hijacked by a liar.”

About the first point, there is little doubt: Santos is a distraction. But a danger to democracy? Torres continues to serve without noticeable complaint alongside Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the former chairman of the Intelligence Committee. 

Schiff and colleagues only recently got done with a years-long campaign to prove that a sitting President colluded with a foreign government to steal his election using mind-warping internet bots, with “evidence” largely adduced by his rival’s campaign. (One thing the latest Twitter Files releases have shown is that even the story of the evil bots was mostly fake.)

He pretended to have access to information the public could not see, that backed up his claims, and relied on the secrecy of the intelligence panel to make that sound credible. He read the notorious and now-debunked Steele Dossier into the Congressional Record. When that document was revealed as a fraud, he insisted it hadn’t been all that important anyway, and denied it was used to obtain secret FISA warrants, when of course it had been. Almost every important thing he said publicly throughout the so-called Russiagate saga was a lie. And meanwhile he turned the Intelligence Committee into just another factory for partisan disinformation.

That’s what a “danger to democracy” might look like. And also what it might look like to have your neighborhood “hijacked by a liar.”

George Santos really ought to take notes.