Latest from his loving fans at the NY Post: Remember how he claimed that his mother had been at work in/around WTC on 9/11 and that caused her later illness and death?
Turns out according to INS/USCIS records, she was back in Brazil between 1999 and 2003.
This dude is special.
It gets better.
A Brazilian LGBTQ+ activist in Brasil responded to a retweet of the NY Times article to say that Santos used to be a drag queen.
I have no idea if this is true or not, but at this point I’d believe just about anything.
I heard he was divorced from a woman. I wonder if George was also her?
I’d fucking take that bet.
I’m starting to wonder if he even really exists.
If he didn’t, would it be necessary to invent him?
Well, now the GQP is going to put its foot down – no more story-telling for him!
I’m a Democrat, and I think that he should be allowed to vote on committees, as that is a big part of what he was elected to do — unless convicted of a crime.
It isn’t obvious to me that Santos-style lies are worse than taking bribes. A bribe-taker votes the way they are bribed to vote. By contrast, Santos may well vote as the 54 percent who elected want him to. And there is a long history of members of both parties taking bribes. We’ve seen it repeatedly in Philadelphia, with most of the bribe-takers (like most of the honest politicians) being Democrats.
The system here isn’t broken.
How can you claim he was elected to do anything, if he lied to the voters to get elected?
If you’re making a point about formal procedures and due process, sure. I’m making an ethical one about what democracy is supposed to be about.
The voters that elected him see all the lies as “Pwning The Libruls”. They got what they wanted.
Democrats also make blatantly untrue statements. Ask any Republican. In recent years, I, a Democrat, believe that Republicans, on average, lie more. Evidence for this can be found at fact-checking checking sites. But if election results are going to be disrespected because there were lies, most elections will be disrespected. As a supporter of little-d democracy, I’m against that.
I absolutely think this is the most likely explanation. Which would tie in with his reported past of identity theft / stolen checks, his lying about everything large and small (the fucking volleyball thing), and his statement that everyone else does it. The sorts of mental illness suggested by you and other posters all involve an element that that everyone else is just like them, they just don’t want to admit it.
My ongoing questions is what sort of people were pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) into his campaign, and what the expected to get out of it. Which I hope we find out sooner than later. Of course, if it was just a grift to pocket money from his donors, well, it would be less sensational, but would fit in perfectly with the stupid psycho theory above…
I came here to post that. Instead I’ll just highlight the existing post. Santos denies the story. Since the guy is so consistently truthful, I guess we have to believe him.
There seems to be a huge excluded middle here. Don’t you think we should at least have some basic standards that disqualify people who blatantly lie about their academic qualifications, career, military service etc.? Is the argument that vetting should just be left to opposing candidates to expose such lies prior to the election, and if they drop the ball on that we’re stuck with what we get?
Bribes are illegal. The Officeholder can go to prison for taking bribes.
I think a key word in your post is “blatantly.” When the liar is someone who has very different policy views, it starts seeming a lot more blatant.
I do think Santos lies a lot.
Aside from everything else I have said, I have never believed in taking a moralistic stance towards the human near-universal of lying. Having DJT, who lies so much more often than the norm, as my president, did shake that belief a bit. But I still hold to it. Proving that we are almost all liars, from time to time, IMHO, will not, on balance, be helpful. I’d rather see more attention to issues than lies.
Honest question for @PhillyGuy - you’ve expressed a couple of different but related sentiments, and I DON’T want to misrepresent you, so I’m trying to figure out exactly where you draw the line.
The first seems to be that lying is part and parcel of politics, and no amount of lies that do not directly harm an individual (such as the exceptions you carved out for regarding violence) override the will of the voters.
The second is that being seated on a committee in the House is an assumed right, and that by denying a seat, for any reason without a criminal conviction is similarly disenfranchising the voters.
I may well be misunderstanding, and wanted to ask where you draw the line on the two points, or if I’m totally wrong in how you intended to represent your POV.
Especially the first point, because if there is zero liability for floating undetected lies, it leads to an interesting future, especially since the GOP in the Trump era fully embraced the concept of ‘alternate facts’. (not saying they’re past that, but…)
Sorry to interrupt this serious discussion of Bad Evil compared to Evil Evil (or maybe to lighten things up here), but does anyone else have this line from the Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy running through their head?
I have, for weeks now.
“Oh, pardon me, “Santos”, if that is your real name…”
Color me surprised. It appears that he may actually be part of the LGBTQ community. I just assumed that he lied about that as well as everything else. The latest reporting is that he performed (not well) as a drag queen in Brazil under the name Kitara.
You just can’t make this stuff up. I sure hope he never tried to read to children.
Why should he? I’d lay long odds he wouldn’t be re-elected, and he isn’t the guy they voted for if his lies weren’t well known.
Having fun here…
OK, so let’s take a step back. We have a cross-dressing, dog-funds-stealing, possibly Brazilian (definitely in trouble in Brazil), Jewish-Hispanic man who has several fake identities, has been running… apparently… small cons for over a decade now… all of a sudden gets around a million shady bucks so he can become a Congressman and embarrass the New York, and national, GOP?
Assuming this guys backer is an American (a big assumption, but lets go with it), who in God’s name could the backer be? Who has the time, the resources, even that sense of playful revenge, to run a con on the GOP like this?
Just racking (wracking?) my brains here and two obvious candidates come up. Al Franken has the time and lives in NYC, but I don’t know if he has the connections (probably) or the motivation (his beef is with Gillibrand, not the NY GOP).
But then… omg, it was obvious. I realized who had the motivation. The spare time. The access to resources. The ingenuity. Connections where this could be buried under a chain of command so convoluted your orders will never get back to you, just as it hasn’t for 40 years, not since you started building your dynasty back in the 1970s.
And did I mention motivation? Against the GOP? In New York?
My God, Santos’ secret backers can only be…
