The Fabulous Mr. Whatshisname, Future MVP

 

If you want to know why House Squeaker Kevin McCarthy is sticking with serial fabulist and likely larcenist George Anthony Devolder Santos Zabrovski, I think we need to start with the shamelessness. You know, like the shamelessness of wearing a stolen scarf to a "Stop the Steal" rally. "They did to me as they did to Donald Trump" he said with a straight face (neither his not Trump's election had been stolen) in clothes he had stolen from someone else.

That level of shamelessness is a superpower. After all, when pressed on Santos' embellishments to his resume, McCarthy said "a lot of people here in the Senate and others" had done the same thing.  It might sound shocking to admit, "Hey, we're all pretty sketchy here", but his point is plain: wouldn't being a brazen liar only help?

Let's face it, by giving Santos his support, McCarthy hopes to get loyalty from Santos, so will perform for him just the way he performed for Baruch College, leading their volleyball team to the championship on two bad knees when he didn't even go there? (He seems to have stolen that story from one of his former bosses.)

That's moxie. 

George Whatshisname will be whatever McCarthy needs. He's already changing the party's diversity profile all by himself, you know, and will be a real influencer with conservative LGB(maybe)T folks. Just the way he's obviously influenced the Jewish community with his real-ish story about his ancestors that never happened. 

And let's talk experience. This is a man that already knows all about checks and balances. Like, if you steal checks, don't try to draw more on them than the account balances. He's really made an impression on NY local politicians--and it looks like he's made an even bigger one on local donors! (Click those last two lovely links--he's part of a very sleazy "only in the GOP" apparatus that doesn't blow the whistle on shady candidates and may even prefer them--and that treats its donors like an ATM with inauthentic repeat credit card drafts).

We all wait with baited breath to see what Santos does for his party next to reward McCarthy for his trust. Because trusting this guy seems to have gone so well for others!

I Feel Bad for Fatima Devolder

 

I don't know much about George Santos' mother other than what fact-checkers have had to debunk. Above, I posted a screenshot of two Tweets from George Santos about his mother's passing: that her life was claimed by 9/11 and that she had died in 2016. This doesn't strike me as so necessarily conflicted--of course, people who were near Ground Zero succumbed, even years later, due to disease from the toxic fallout of the rubble. If she contracted cancer from that, however later, it is just as much a case of 9/11 claiming her life as if she had passed when the Towers fell. 

Only--Santos says she was an executive working at a major financial institution, and it appears she was actually a domestic worker or home health aide. So how was she even there? Was she?

We can question whether his need for assistance with the burial matches his bio--and I will say, I believe he had financial problems.  I can see with my own eyes the struggle was real. But why did he have to lie so much about his mother? 

He concocted from nothing at all a story about her family and variously said she was from Belgium, or that her ancestors were Ukrainian Jews with the family name "Zabrovsky". He said his mother fled socialism in Belgium (which is not a socialist country) and also that his Ukrainian Jewish forebears fled the Holocaust because of socialism (because the whole "First they came for the socialists" thing is entirely lost on people whose life of the mind is entirely constructed of fables). 

George Santos, Caucasian, Jew-ish and Black (because he claims Angolan ancestry via his father) never seems to think his own story is good enough. Or that his own mother's story was good enough. He name-checks the Holocaust, 9/11 and even fabricated employees that died in the Pulse shooting as if only major events give meaning to one's life. 

His actual story, as a first-generation American who had a loving mother who protected him even though he was a check-stealing shit back in Rio de Janeiro, was not enough. That he now pretends he made a fortune just a minute ago in something he refers to as "capital introduction" can only make us wonder who introduced this ne'er-do-well to the kind of capital that finances a successful congressional campaign--and investigators are gonna be on it. (I always suspect Russians but Dark Money is a real thing, too.)

His lies about who he is and who she was fall around her--unable to say one word because she isn't alive to say her piece.  But I think she deserved better. Who she actually was should have been enough. 

UPDATE: Is he a chronic liar because he had a brain tumor or did he have a brain tumor because he's a chronic liar? 

3 years ago, he claimed he had a brain tumour and received chemo… pic.twitter.com/fBclHQjrps

— Ravin Boodram (@rvbdrm) December 29, 2022

How the whole hell?  I mean, how the whole hell? 

 

The Santos Clause

 

Imagine the wonderland this country is, because only here can a scrappy self-made grifter wake up one day going from bouncing rent checks to being a Wall Street success, achieve a good, solid education, run a charity, never experience discrimination as a gay person (probably because of being straight-married until just before running for office) with an incredible backstory of being descended from Holocaust survivors. 

You can even largely self-fund your campaign for congress, or maybe, just with a lot of Russian oligarch money. 

Yes. A GOP candidate probably backed with Russian oligarch money who does not seem to be the guy he represents himself as. 

People can point fingers at whether the Democrats did enough oppo research or whether the local news media looked hard enough at this guy's campaign, but can we just admit that it's no accident someone like this crops up in the GOP?

Texas GOP are Making Special Choices

 

Apparently, the Log Cabin (I always fight my fingers not to type "Log Closet") Republicans are a little bit mad that the Texas GOP shut them out of their little get together. Like, yeah you can be disappointed but how are you surprised? Did Gov. Abbott not just criminalize basically treating trans kids at all? Make families where trans kids exist basically have to consider where they will move? In a state where the Governor basically puts a target on LGBT families, (the threat is real everywhere) are Gay Republican Texans thinking they are up above this mess? 

Tell you what, the "besieged" party that has been running Texas for the past couple decades thinks the answer is letting the queers know they are abnormal.  Forget what you think you know about what ails the state-- it's at least a little bit about LGBT people and maybe the whole weather thing is about prayer. (I'm just saying--same religious signifying, now with more scapegoating.) Could Texas Republicans do actual things that matter policy-wise for their citizens?*

Hahahahah-nope. They want a constitutional convention to prevent the federal government from stopping them from being as shitty as they want to be for marginalized people. They would greatly prefer no one ever taught their kids non-Confederate-loving history and worry the church is threatened by education existing. 

And Proud Boys attacked Dan Crenshaw of all conservative people as being John McCain with an eyepatch because their golden White Supremacist media god Tucker Carlson told them to. That's fucking crazy. 

But again--not surprising. The thing with a monster is, if you feed it, it grows, and that is what happens when you feed fascism. It grows. And that means that eliminationism becomes a fact, and the "management" of political figures by violent correction becomes a fact. When you encourage conspiracy theories, the truth becomes hairy. When you scapegoat, anyone can come under the onus. When you enable bullying, the bully boys become the only government that exists. And they suck. 

That means people need to make better choices while choices are still available. 

* (Yes, if they chose Beto O'Rourke and give him some Democrats in the State leg. Otherwise, probably not, all things like this considered.) 

UPDATE: I know full well they put some bullshit about wanting to secede from the Union and not accepting Joe Biden as their president into that document. But in the grand scheme of things, there's less they can immediately do about that shit than they can about fucking up marginalized peoples' lives and so on. And I know there are people who are like "Let Texas secede." Yeah, well, let me tell you about the people who don't vote Republican/don't vote at all. They don't deserve that life. It's a shame to suggest it. But yeah, the only out I see is the people make the stupids go away by taking their asses out of office. 

UPDATE: I know it's kind of fucked up that I didn't even reference the election denialism and the implied secessionism, but after the Tea Party and Birtherism, that's kind of old hat, isn't it? The Big Lie invalidates Biden because Biden is an old white guy and you can't pretend he wasn't born here. But I take for granted all Republicans believe that any Democratic president is somehow, some way, invalid. President Clinton's first term was supposed to be problematic because he didn't have a majority, with there being a third party candidate (that was trashed when he decisively won his second term, and the Whitewater investigation had to get nastier). And when Obama had Bin Laden taken out and issued his birth certificate, you know, Benghazi became this major thing. Republicans don't believe Democrats should exist be in office. I believe one of their pundits once said a fewliberals should be kept around in cages to remind people of what we were like but I can't remember who it was at the moment. Probably Ann Coulter.