Kurt Bardella started in politics at Breitbart and the Daily Caller and then went to work for Darrell Issa when Issa was chair of the House Oversight Committee. By the end of 2017, he had had enough of the GOP and switched his party affiliation to the Democrats. He wrote that the Republican Party had not only lost touch with meat-and-potato issues but “pander to a lunatic fringe that subscribes to an ideology of hate and fear.”
Over the weekend he was marveling at the George Santos phenomenon. “There isn’t a better living mascot for what the Republican party is turning itself into than George Santos— one that is completely divorced from truth and reality, one that openly embraces conspiracy theory, one that time and again rejects fact and science. When you have the standard bearer for your party be someone like Donald Trump, who lies about everything from classified documents to the crowd size of his inauguration and everything in between, it’s only a matter of time before people emerge who completely bathe themselves in lies. It’s hardly surprising that someone like Santos has emerged and successfully conned his way into elected office and the Republican party leadership’s refusal to do anything or say anything about it only encourages copycats to follow.”
Mississippi conservative Republican Stuart Stevens went from being top Mitt Romney advisor to a #NeverTrumper Lincoln Project principal. He’s not a big fan George Santos fan either and sees him as emblematic of what is happening to his party. “Santos is a perfect example of the collapse of the Republican party. It shows that the party stands for nothing. It seems like a million years ago but there was a time when we said character was destiny. Nobody even knows who this guy is. We literally don’t know his real name.”
The Dispatch’s David French is a right-wing homophobic religious nut and columnist who has drifted away from that world because of Trump. Yesterday, he noted that Santos is an “almost purely fraudulent man who represents the culmination of the post-truth, post-character right… Sarah Rumpf has put together a “complete-ish” ranking of his extraordinary lies. Among many other things, there’s overwhelming evidence he’s lied about his education, lied about his drag queen past, lied about the death of his mother, lied about his career, lied about his ethnic heritage, and lied about his family escaping the Holocaust.”
What’s the GOP response? While some officials are calling for him to resign (good on them), Congressional Republican leaders are reportedly set on giving him committee assignments.
And why not? Our political culture has always had trouble with the truth, but is there a single moment since Donald Trump clinched the nomination in 2016 that “telling the truth” has been a cardinal Republican virtue? Or even a virtue at all?
…George Santos was inevitable. The American right rendered him inevitable. And now it lives with the consequences.
Santos— like QAnon crackpots Marjorie Traitor Greene and Lauren Boebert and child sex trafficker Matt Gaetz— is now a prominent face of the Republican Party. How many Republican members of Congress get a whole episode of Saturday Night Live dedicated to them? Far more Americans know George Santos, or whatever his name is, than know who House Majority Leader Steve Scalise or House Majority White Tom Emmer is. Scalise was frist elected in 2007 and Emmer in 2014. Santos has been a member of Congress for less than a month. I suspect Democrats will hang him around the neck of every Republican politician until the party finally dumps him.
UPDATE: New Yorkers Want Santos To Resign-- Republicans Dislike Him Even More Than Democrats Do!
A new Siena poll out this morning, shows an overwhelming response to whatever his name is: resign. Siena pollster Steven Greenberg: “Voters overwhelmingly view Santos unfavorably, including 55% of Democrats, 56% of Republicans and 59% of independents. Again, downstate suburbanites lead the state, 76%, in their unfavorable view of Santos… It is fascinating that Santos has gone from largely unknown freshman representative-elect to being more well known to New Yorkers than Brooklyn’s Hakeem Jeffries, just elected to his sixth term and the new U.S. House Minority Leader.”