(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Santos admitted he's 'been a terrible liar,' then kept right on lying [1] ['Daily Kos Staff', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-22 On two different occasions in 2022, Santos said, on the radio, “I’m a Latino Jew.” Not an “ish” in sight. He also wrote to Jewish groups, “As a proud American Jew, I have been to Israel numerous times from educational, business, and leisurely trips.” Again, no “ish.” Santos has told varying stories about his heritage, but he definitely cannot say he never claimed to be Jewish, or that he only claimed to be Jew-ish as a joke. Where many of Santos’ lies were resume embellishment of a really extreme kind, claiming to be Jewish is something different. He was lying in a deep way about who he was and where he came from, and doing it for political benefit. Similarly, in his interview with Morgan, he continued to deflect on his misrepresentations of his own mother’s death. In 2021, he tweeted, “9/11 claimed my mother's life,” but it was subsequently revealed that his mother died in 2016. He has also claimed that his mother was in the World Trade Center on 9/11, a claim he stuck by when Morgan pressed him on official documents stating that his mother was not in the U.S. between 1999 and 2003. ”I won't debate my mother's life as she's passed in [2016], and it's quite insensitive to try to rehash my mother's legacy,” Santos said. George, it’s not your mother’s legacy that’s being rehashed. It’s your lies. Trying to guilt-trip people for being mean to your poor dead mother is certainly one way to get out of having claimed she died 15 years before she actually died. But it’s not just a “I was in the top 1% of my college class” kind of lie. It’s deeper than that. Even some of Santos’ straight resume-embellishment lies make no sense. For instance, Santos will now admit that he did not graduate from Baruch College, but he’s still claiming to have attended Horace Mann, a New York City prep school which has no record of Santos attending under any of the names he is known to have used. His story about his attendance there has also changed—during the 2020 campaign, he claimed to have had to leave for financial reasons with just four months left before graduation, while he insisted to Morgan that, despite the school saying he had not attended, “I was there for six months of ninth grade.” But why would you admit to having lied about having gone to college but refuse to admit having lied about where you went to high school for a relatively brief period? Along with his claim that he graduated from Baruch College—in the top 1%, no less—Santos had claimed that he got a 710 on the GMAT, the standardized test often used for business school admissions. Now he denies that he ever said that. “The reality is, I don’t know where that ‘GMAT’ comes from. I never put that out on my website or my bio,” Santos told Morgan, who informed him it was on his resume. So Santos then denied having had anything to do with his own resume, saying, “I have no idea where that came from,” and that “I didn’t supply it, and nobody associated with me supplied it. That came from the GOP, and I’m still trying to understand where that came from.” It should not surprise you to learn that a representative of the Nassau County Republican Party told CNN that Santos “personally presented” them the resume. It’s not incidental to this story that Santos is a Republican. It’s not incidental because he has continued to have the support of his leadership, which is placing the leverage his vote gives Republicans above the basic integrity of expelling someone who was elected based on a series of lies. It’s also not incidental because it's not just Santos. Two other Republican House members first elected in 2022 turn out to have fabricated big chunks of their personal stories. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, like Santos, claimed to be Jewish—with the special twist that it turned out her grandfather had been a Nazi. Rep. Andy Ogles claimed to be “a former member of law enforcement” who had “worked in international sex crimes, specifically child trafficking,” when—shades of Herschel Walker—his only law enforcement experience was a brief stint as a volunteer reserve deputy in his local sheriff’s office. Why do so many Republicans feel they need to lie about who they are and what they’ve done in the world? Why does their political movement and party seem to attract so many liars and outright grifters? Maybe it’s because of the rot at the heart of it all, because when you put power above principle, you attract people who take it the next step and then the next, until you’re a party filled with people like George Santos and Anna Paulina Luna and Andy Ogles and Herschel Walker and, yes, Donald Trump. A party where the alternative is people like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, who are probably mostly truthful about who they are but will say just about anything to get attention. Or Kevin McCarthy, who wanted to be speaker of the House much more than he wanted to do anything with the job, so he was willing to bargain away its potential power as long as he got the title. The whole endeavor is just rotten, and someone like Santos may seem like a fluke, but he’s not. There’s a reason he is where he is, politically speaking. RELATED STORIES: Another Santos-style Republican representative appears to be making up her life story as she goes Third serial fabricator among GOP freshmen unmasked: This one claims he hunted sex criminals [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/22/2154448/-Santos-admitted-he-s-been-a-terrible-liar-then-kept-right-on-lying Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/