McCARTHY AND SANTOS

I’m later in writing about this than I intended. That was because after reading what’s immediately below, my reaction was such that “If my thought dreams could be seen, they WOULD put my head in a guillotine.

If you doubt that George Santos is one of the worst human beings you have ever heard of, someone who even challenges the entity struggling to be Donald Trump, this article from the Patch in Oyster Bay, N.Y should resolve things:

“In May 2016, Richard Osthoff was living in a tent in an abandoned chicken coop on the side of Route 9 in Howell, New Jersey, with his beloved service dog Sapphire. A veteran's charity gave the pit mix to Osthoff, a disabled veteran who was honorably discharged from the U.S. Navy in 2002, he told Patch. When Sapphire developed a life-threatening stomach tumor, Osthoff, now 47, learned the surgery would cost $3,000, He was told by a veterinary technician that 'I know a guy who runs a pet charity who can help you,' Osthoff recounted. His name was Anthony Devolder, and his pet charity was called Friends of Pets United, the vet tech told him. Anthony Devolder is one of the names that Long Island Rep. George Santos used for years before entering politics in 2020.

“Osthoff and another New Jersey veteran, retired police Sgt. Michael Boll, who tried to intervene to help Osthoff in 2016, told Patch that Santos closed the GoFundMe he set up for Sapphire after it raised $3,000 on social media and disappeared. Sapphire died Jan. 15, 2017. After being out of work with a broken leg for over a year, Osthoff couldn't afford the dog's euthanasia and cremation, he said. ‘I had to panhandle. It was one of the most degrading things I ever had to do,’ he remembered.”

George Santos is so far beyond belief, such a worthless piece of shit - what kind of a person does this? Bilking charitable citizens who wanted to help and believed he was someone who would care for the service dog of a homeless veteran, with whom the dog was living in a tent inside an abandoned chicken coop. That when the veteran asked for the money, Santos tried to make it the fault of the veteran that he was “unable” to fulfill his promise to help. Charles Pierce put it well: “A homeless veteran. His sick dog. And $3,000 contributed by good citizens who deserve better than to be represented in Congress by a piece of chewing gum stuck to the bottom of democracy's shoe.”

With this Santos can celebrate his elevation to membership on House committees and the apparent support of Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. And be voted into those committe positions by ALL members of the House Republicans including the “Biden District Republicans” everyone is expecting will “do the right thing” and save the country from the ignorance and malevolence of their fellow caucus members.

I eventually remembered the phone message my screenwriter friend Susan Woollen placed on her answering machine while dealing with some Disney “development executives” on a project many years ago, in which she told them to “go die alone in the cold and the dark from a debilitating and extremely painful socially-unacceptable disease.”

That’s what I hope happens to this scumbag.

I can’t really tell if Santos is the worst, or the worst are the rest of the caucus - most particularly those who claim not to be “crazies” - who accept this outrage and vote to let this embarrassment happen?

We now know that Kevin McCarthy and the House Republican Steering Committee think nothing of the Committee on Small Business and the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, since those are the panels they assigned Santos to. He had the chutzpah to privately lobby GOP leaders to serve on two more high-profile committees, the committee overseeing the financial sector and the Foreign Relations Committee. The chairmen of those committees balked at adding him.

Republicans have decided to treat Santos like any other member. Texas Republican Rep. Roger Williams, chairman of the House Small Business Committee for the 118th Congress, defended putting Santos on his committee. “I don’t condone what he said, what he’s done. I don’t think anybody does. But that’s not my role. He was elected,” Williams told CNN.

The only thing Santos has done that apparently upset Quiverin’ Qevin a bit was when one of his campaign staffers allegedly impersonated McCarthy’s chief of staff to solicit campaign donations during both of his 2020 and 2022 campaigns.

You can tell a lot about a person by how they dress. Santos’ particular costume screams Fraud, as Vanessa Friedman, the style editor at the New York Times pointed out today with a column on his costuming. She argues that the specific outfit choices were crucial in convincing his fellow Republicans that he was the real thing. She quotes Lisa Birnbach, author of “The Official Preppy Handbook,”that something doesn't quite add up about his style:

“He went deep into the costume department of the popular culture hive mind and built his cover story layer by layer, garment by garment. Mr. Santos’s version of preppy style is too groomed, too layered, too contrived to be that of a genuine prepster,” noting she hadn’t seen a crew neck under a blazer over a tie since George Plimpton ran The Paris Review. “He looks like an extra in ‘Family Ties,’ the sitcom that starred Michael J. Fox as a teenage Republican. He’s trying too hard.”

Friedman notes what Santos does is “not unlike Frank Abagnale shrugging on a PanAm pilot’s uniform in ‘Catch Me If You Can’ to convince the watching world he is a pilot, or Anna Sorokin, a.k.a. Anna Delvey, the fake heiress of recent grift, swanning through New York society in Celine sunglasses and Gucci sandals. Or even Elizabeth Holmes assuming the black turtleneck of Steve Jobs, and with it his mystique.”

The greatest grifters have always known that dressing the part is half the game.

Santos says he went to Horace Mann, Baruch and N.Y.U. and came from money, so he wears the uniform of preppy private-school boys everywhere: the button-up white shirt, crew-neck sweater blue blazer and khaki trousers, “like something straight out of ‘Dead Poets Society.’”

He says he was a financier, who worked at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs? “Lo, the three-quarter zip sweater and fleece (or fleece-like) vest, uniform of bankers everywhere.

Friedman points out that, “He may wear suits sometimes, but it is the sweaters, in their various permutations, that have been the telling detail, along with the horn-rimmed glasses — visual shorthand, in pretty much every medium, for intellectual. Both are props that push the buttons of stereotype buried in our subconscious. We are so much more likely to believe a story if it is embedded in the codes we expect, dress code being among the first.”

“Clothes are the camouflage that gets you in the door. Especially in a world in which the line between visual truth and fiction is increasingly filtered.”

Santos dressed up his story of “embodying the American dream” in the fashion vernacular of archetypes. “By indulging public preconceptions of how someone with his résumé should look, Mr. Santos was implicitly underscoring his own credibility.”

Some observers are now speculating that the glasses are fakes, that they don’t have the distortions associated with corrective lenses.

That someone like Santos can grift his way into the House of Representatives and then be defended by Republican leaders for whom holding power is not only everything but the only thing, that everyone from the feckless McCarthy to Representative Rogers will justify their lack of action and their lack of any claim to moral leadership by the excuse, “He was elected,” is just another example of the moral failure of the Republicans and their unfitness to serve in any position in government.

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