MAUREEN CALLAHAN: Congress can't elect a speaker. But they MUST oust George ... trends now
Not since Anthony Weiner has New York produced such a craven, dishonest sham of a congressman.
Nor such an entertaining one.
Representative-elect George Santos, due to be sworn into Congress, is the rubbernecking event of the year. I know — that's an early and daring assessment, but this guy is a runaway train of crazy, a pathological liar who evinces no shame at having been caught out, and, like Weiner before him, seems determined to play out his self-immolation on the national stage.
Now, I know what many of you are probably thinking: A politician who lies? Isn't lying part of the job description? Trump and his administration coined 'fake news' and 'alternative facts.' Joe Biden's been telling whoppers his whole career.
And it would seem no young congressman could compare to Weiner, whose infamous sexting habit cost him his job in Congress, his marriage to Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin and sent him to prison.
So, you may ask, what makes some congressman from Queens so special?
Size, scale and scope, my friends, with a soupçon of crazy-eyed, baby-faced shamelessness.
Santos somehow managed to dodge any reasonable due diligence on the part of the Republican Party — you know, the kind that would have told a campaign manager, 'Hey, this guy's a total fraud and a liability.'
He somehow managed to then run two campaigns and win one without encountering any proper opposition research or major media outlet digging into his claims until after the election.
But has he done anything worse than all the resume-embellishing, self-inflating politicians who came before him?
Representative-elect George Santos (above), due to be sworn into Congress, is the rubbernecking event of the year.
Not since Anthony Weiner (above) has New York produced such a craven, dishonest sham of a congressman.
Well, yes.
Here's just a sampling of what we know… so far:
Santos lied about attending the elite Manhattan prep school Horace Mann. He lied about his parents having extensive real estate holdings, about working for Goldman Sachs, about standing up to the C-suite for investing in renewables, about working for Citigroup, about graduating from NYU and Baruch College.
The day after Christmas, Santos tried to minimize this mushrooming scandal. 'I didn't graduate from any institution of higher learning,' he told the New York Post. 'I'm embarrassed and sorry for having embellished my resumé . . . We do stupid things in life.'
Believe a con man when he apologizes? As the saying goes, where there's one cockroach there's an army.
So we have also come to learn that Santos has lied about stuff that matters, tragedies we all hold sacred: The Holocaust and 9/11.
It feels like someone lying about having cancer — few things are lower, greasier, more disgusting.
Santos lied about his grandparents fleeing the Nazis. He said his mother died in the 9/11 attacks at the World Trade Center, that she had been in the South Tower; she actually died in 2016.
What else? Santos said he was Jewish, but when he was revealed to actually be Catholic (what else? Black is white and up is down in Santos-world), he had the temerity to say the mistake was on us.
'I never claimed to be Jewish,' Santos told the New York Post. 'I said I was Jew-ish.'
George Santos is Seinfeld's George Costanza, right? You can
