By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, December 29, 2022
George Santos is a liar. George Santos is a ridiculous
liar. George Santos is a habitual liar. George Santos is a liar who lies about
things that it doesn’t make sense to lie about, apparently just to keep in
practice. George Santos lies about lying, and then he lies about having lied
about lying. George Santos is such a pathetic and risible liar that QAnon kook
Marjorie Taylor Greene—a hobbyist liar who turned pro a few years back—rolls
her eyes about what a lying liar that lying liar is.
Question: Is that a problem for a Republican elected
official here at the last dying gasps of Anno Domini 2022?
I don’t see how. Rep. Greene wants you to believe that
shadowy Jews are using lasers to manipulate the weather. Almost every
Republican who matters or who should matter—Kevin McCarthy, Ted Cruz, Marco
Rubio, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley—stood there looking stupid for six years (and counting)
while Donald Trump told lie after lie after lie, nodding their empty little
heads like a ghastly collection of particularly demented bobblehead dolls. The
main themes of right-wing talk radio and cable news right now
are—still—vaccine-conspiracy kookery and stolen-election kookery. Even if the
contemporary Republican Party could take five minutes away from whatever the
grift of the week is and work up a good head of moral-outrage steam about
George Santos—the wildly successful grandson of Jewish refugees from the
Holocaust who proved himself at Baruch College and NYU before rising through
the ranks at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup before accumulating an impressive
portfolio of investments who isn’t wildly successful or Jewish or the grandson
of Holocaust refugees and who didn’t go to Baruch or NYU or work at Goldman or
Citigroup and who apparently is something of a slacker but swears up and down
that he positively absolutely is not a criminal so sir!—who would take them
seriously? Who could take them seriously?
Kicking George Santos out of Congress is a job for the
people of Long Island, one that they can do for themselves if they should
happen to discover some particle of communal self-respect. But there are things
that Republicans in Congress could and should do to set an example here: They
could and should refuse to give him committee assignments; they could and
should vote to censure him; they could and should expel him from the Republican
Party. It wouldn’t mean much coming from the motley crew of Chalmun’s Spaceport
Cantina characters that is the Republican leadership today or from the
generally invertebrate Republican electorate for which it stands, but it would
be a start.
On a recent appearance on The Remnant,
Jessica Gavora said that
what the Republican Party needs is a “reckoning,” and that is exactly the
right word. A reckoning is only partly about imposing sanctions on
offenders—and, in this case, such sanctions necessarily would be only symbolic,
because imposing real sanctions on those who had performed shamefully during
the Trump years, up to and including the attempted post-election coup
d’état, would result in the effective liquidation of the Republican Party
as a whole. (Which would not be the worst outcome, but that’s another column.)
A reckoning is also about putting down an accounting of what has happened,
making a useful historical record of who did what when and to how great a
degree of culpability. This is necessary for many reasons, one of which is the
fact that in the Trump years the GOP showed itself to be not a party infected
by the occasional scoundrel and prevaricator but a party with a corporate
commitment to the worst and most obvious kind of dishonesty, a party in which
embracing lies and furthering lies became, perversely, a test of virtue.
If the Republican Party would like to make a desperately
needed New Year’s resolution, it should be this: that the GOP will cease being
an organization dedicated to lies, based on lies, trafficking in lies,
cultivating lies, and strategically reliant on lies. The Republicans should
embark on a very modest course of self-improvement that begins with telling the
truth. Of course, such a specimen as George Santos would have no place in such
a party.
Neither would Donald Trump, Kevin McCarthy, Newt
Gingrich, Sean Hannity, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren
Boebert, Mike Pence …
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