Rant #3,051: Tell the Truth

I can see into the future, and I don’t need a crystal ball to do so …

A bumbling human being somehow outwits governmental officials, using a pack of lies, one larger than the other, and is actually elected to our House of Representatives.

When the truth is found out, he is scorned by just about everyone he comes into contact with, is asked to resign, refuses to do so, and his two-year term is somehow filled by this supposed legislator, who was actually called “sick and in need of help” by the county executive in which his district is a major portion of.

After the two years, he slinks out of governmental service, but has a multi-million-dollar book deal on the table to tell us all how he did it, and yes, a movie deal too.

And one of the news networks gobbles this guy up as a commentator.

You could not make this stuff up, but right now, everything but the last two things I wrote here are true.

George Santos—if that is his real, actual name—refuses to step down from his seat in the House, even thought the wagons have surrounded him and are looking for anything that he did that was actually illegal.

We have all learned through this saga that lying is not an illegal action—many prominent people do so for their own aggrandizement, including politicians—but there just has to be a smoking gun with Santos, and I think if they get him, they will get him because his finances were not in order, not because he lied about the colleges he went to, the corporations he worked for, or his ethnic background.

We have learned that you can lie about all of that, but once it gets to money … and money ferreted out to and from different sources, you better be telling the truth.

Bur right now, he is still in office, must be called “Rep.” Santos, and is in the process of setting up his office in Washington.

Yesterday, in late morning, every Nassau County Long Island Republican worth his or her salt joined a press conference and demanded that Santos resign from office.

It was almost funny watching these legislators talk about their own honesty, and the ruse that Santos pulled over their own eyes.

The head of the Nassau County Republican Party admitted that the vetting process was not good enough to weed out Santos; others said they backed him and they trusted that his resume was fact, not fiction; and still others said that they felt betrayed.

Why don’t you just say that you were duped, made a terrible mistake, and that you let down your constituents with your approval of this liar?

As I said earlier, one of these mopes—the Nassau County Executive, no less—suddenly became a doctor during this press conference, saying that Santos was sick and needed medical attention immediately.

No, what was sick was that all of these legislators—with probably a collective more than a century of experience, or maybe even more than that—fell for this pack of lies.

The power in both the House and Senate, as I have learned writing about governmental entitles for the past more than a quarter of a century—is that the power in those two houses of government lies in the committees, who is on those committees and what those committees are able to enact.

There are several prestigious committees, among them the House and Senate Armed Services Committee, which pretty much oversee our reaction to armed conflict during peacetime and wartime.

But there are other less prestigious committees which oversee other areas that don’t get as much press as the HASC and SASC do, but they are really the backbone of our government.

Santos—if he is able to continue his term—should never, ever be named to any committee. He cannot be trusted with carrying out the membership role of whatever committee he might be on, and he certainly cannot be trusted with any sensitive material.

That is where the power of the two houses is, and if he refuses to resign, he must be held off of any committee, which would make him a paper legislator basically waiting for his term to end and keeping the seat warm for whoever follows him.

Yes, it is unfair to his constituents, but give him as little to do as possible, and when his two years are up, he will be done forever as a legislator, and can move on to another field where the vetting is better.

And I am almost sure that in the long run—because our country is almost obsessed with forgiving and forgetting and giving people second chances—he will emerge somewhere, and his notoriety will propel him to even greater fame—and income—than he already has from this current canard.

That old axiom “Liar, liar, stick your head in fire” probably won’t ever apply here, although red-faced legislators who believed in this guy probably wished that it would.