The fantasies of George Santos – Kevin McCarthy no closer to his goal than before – Evening statistics
Our legislative branch of the government has not always distinguished itself for its usefulness, but lately it is providing an unceasing source of entertainment.
The protagonist of Lettice and Lovage, a play by Peter Shaffer, is a guide who is bored to distraction by the tedious monologue about the old house to which she is assigned that she is forced to recite to yawning, inattentive tourists. One day, however, she decides to jettison the historic facts altogether, re-invent the past, and supply inquiring visitors with increasingly bizarre and salacious stories about “Fustian House,” which naturally causes them to flock in droves to her tours and listen to her improvisations with mingled fascination and delight.
George Santos, the recently-elected House member from New York, has done precisely the same thing. Among his claims are: 1) that his maternal grandparents were Ukrainian Jews who fled to Belgium and then to Brazil to escape the Holocaust during World War II (he is Catholic and his family had lived in Brazil for three generations before his parents settled in the U.S.); 2) that his mother was “the first female executive at a major financial institution” and that she worked in the South Tower of the World Trade Center, dying a few years after the September 11 attacks (she was a domestic worker who spoke no English and earned a living by selling food and cleaning houses); 3) that he was born and raised in abject poverty (which is in direct conflict with Claim #2, but – oh, never mind); 4) that he attended the prestigious Horace Mann preparatory school before withdrawing on account of financial hardship, held a bachelor’s degree in finance and economics from Baruch College, and obtained an MBA from New York University (none of the schools has any record of his attendance, and the period that he said he was at Baruch overlaps with the time he is known to have lived in Brazil); 5) that he worked as a journalist at a major news organization but that his name was omitted from the organization’s website (I wonder why); 6) that he and his family owned 13 rental properties in New York (if so, he didn’t list them on his campaign’s financial disclosure forms and there is nothing in the public records to support this assertion – and, also, what the hell happened to that “abject poverty” claim he made earlier?); 7) that he worked for the eminent firms of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs (neither company has any record of him); 8) that while employed at Goldman he attended the SALT private equity conference seven years earlier where, on a panel, he criticized his employer for investing in renewable energy, calling it a taxpayer-subsidized scam (Anthony Scaramucci, who runs the conference, said there is no record of Santos having sat on a single panel or even having attended any SALT conference); 9) that . . . but why continue? Suffice it to say that he answers to the description that Mary McCarthy once gave of Lillian Hellman: every word he says Is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’. He has the distinction of being one of the two gay Representatives for New York, but he may even be lying about his sexual orientation as well. When running for office he described himself as “openly gay” and hinted that he had been discriminated against on that account. However, he was once married to a woman named Uadla Santos Vieira in 2012, even though the pair divorced seven years later. He never mentioned this marriage during his campaign or indeed at any other time; and it did not become publicly known until the Daily Beast disclosed it. Santos thus presents the unique case of a self-declared homosexual being “outed” as someone who is actually straight, or at the very least bi-sexual. In 2014 he lived with one Pedro Vilarva, but this relationship also foundered, with Vilarva moving out a few months afterwards, allegedly being fed up with Santos’s constant stream of prevarications. But just as in the case of Shaffer’s Lettice, Santos’s lies have proved to be more exciting than the actual biographical facts, and New Yorkers have swallowed them as eagerly as the fictional tourists of Fustian House. I wish them joy of their new Representative.
“About to go to the House floor,” California Representative-elect Ted Lieu tweeted earlier this week, alongside a photo of him holding a bag of popcorn. The show that he is referring to, of course, is that of the debacle of Kevin McCarthy’s attempt to become House Speaker, which has now failed for the tenth consecutive time. This increasingly embarrassing spectacle has become the longest speaker contest in 164 years. The Democrats, needless to say, are watching on with glee. The party’s leadership has requested them to remain in Washington until someone is elected, for if any of them depart the number of votes that McCarthy is required to obtain for the position will be lowered, and they do not want to do anything that will pave the way to his goal. “At the end of the day, this is a Republican mess,” said Ro Khanna, another Representative-elect. “This is a failure of them to govern. This is their problem to fix.”
The mild weather lasted through the end of today, but colder and more seasonal temperatures are coming. I shall miss out on them on a while, however, for I will be spending a few days in New Orleans, where temperatures will be in the 60s – that is to say, comparable to temperatures of April and May here.
Today’s statistics as of 9:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 667,039,556; # of deaths worldwide: 6,705,928; # of cases U.S.: 103,043,225; # of deaths; U.S.: 1,120,801.