Q Toon: Disclaim to Fame

There being already far too many editorial cartoons depicting Congressnewbie-elect* George Santos (R-LI) with a Pinocchio schozzola, my take on the guy here is a reference to the printed disclaimers in television ads where they tell you all the reasons why you shouldn't take the advertiser at their word. The print is deliberately too tiny for you to read (they had to make it smaller as large-screen TVs became more affordable), and, just in case you're sitting up close to the screen, it's gone before you have a chance to read past half of the first line anyway.

I've deemed Mr. Santos worthy of a cartoon for the LGBTQ+ press on the basis of his being gay — what is known in LGBTQ+ circles as a homocon.

The "con" in that contraction is short for "conservative," not "congressman," "con artist" or "convict," but I concede that one could easily be considerably confused.

After his upset win in November, the New York Times revealed that a hell of a lot of what Santos said about himself has been lies. He claimed that his grandparents were survived the Holocaust as Ukrainian Jewish refugees from Belgium; they emigrated to Brazil well before the Nazis came to power. Santos has had to backtrack statements that he's Jewish; he now says that he meant to say he is "Jew-ish." Sources say that he is actually Cathol-ic.

He claimed to have earned a bachelors degree in economics and finance from Baruch College in 2010; the school has no record of it. 

He claimed to have founded an animal rescue charity that he ran from 2013 to 2018; it was never registered with the IRS. He claimed to have worked at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, which has come as a surprise to Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.

Further playing into his purported real estate expertise, Santos claimed, as a landlord, he was hurt by Covid-19 related eviction protections given to renters. He went so far as saying he had not received nearly one year’s worth of rent on 13 properties. Yet, Santos did not list any properties on required financial disclosure forms, only one was mentioned—an apartment in Brazil. What makes this lie particularly spicy is the fact that The Times found that Santos actually faced multiple evictions as a renter, even being fined about $12,000 in a civil judgment.

He claimed to have earned $750,000 plus reaping $1 million to $5 million in dividends as the sole owner of a family firm, a situation that is murky at best. Whatever the firm did and who its clients were, nobody knows.

(I'm not prepared to include the discrepancy between Santos's tweets that his mother was a victim of the 9/11 attacks and that she died of cancer in December of 2016. Plenty of New Yorkers blame their subsequent cancers on the debris of the World Trade Center collapse, and I'm not a medical examiner.)

The fact that the fictitiocity of Mr. Santos's curriculum vitae hasn't come out until after his election may be one sorry result of the gutting of newsroom staffs everywhere. It isn't as if Santos were a complete unknown in 2022; he ran unsuccessfully for the same congressional seat in 2020.

His claims this time around had, moreover, been questioned in the North Shore Leader of Long Island back in September:

...when few others were covering Santos, about his “inexplicable rise” in reported net worth, from essentially nothing in 2020 to as much as $11 million two years later.

The North Shore Leader leans heavily Republican; its publisher is a three-time former candidate for that same congressional seat.

The Leader reluctantly endorsed Santos’s Democratic opponent the next month. “This newspaper would like to endorse a Republican,” it wrote, but Santos “is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot,” adding, “He boasts like an insecure child — but he’s most likely just a fabulist — a fake.

Now, mendacity is almost a prerequisite for a political career. Joe Biden's 1988 presidential run foundered when he was caught cribbing a British politician's life story as his own. Bill Clinton lied about having sexual relations with an intern.

And of course, neither of them hold a candle to the Prince of Lies who befouled the Oval Office from 2017 to 2021, disgorging some 30,000+ whoppers as President.

Perhaps instead of televised debates between candidates, what this country really needs is requiring every candidate to appear on television, with the fact-checkers from Snopes, Poynter, Politifact, and (not or) FactCheck.org, to defend their prevarications.

With one of those big red X's across the screen and a loud buzzer blaring every time the candidate gives a wrong answer.

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* Mr. Santos cannot be sworn into office until after somebody has been elected Speaker of the House. As of this writing, there is no sign of there being a compromise candidate who is acceptable to both the oligarch and fascist wings of the Republican Party.