George Santos is the Embodiment of Today's GOP

Donald Trump began the normalization of constant outright lies within the Republican Party.  Quickly, Trump came to set the standard for the dishonesty that now defines the Republican Party as other Republicans jettisoned truth and objective fact to pander to the increasingly uneducated base of the party even though they knew full well that they were lying and disseminating a constream of falsehoods.  Josh Hawley, Tim Cotton and Ted Cruz despite their Ivy League credentails happily stoop to any lengths to "own the libs" and thrill the party base.  Add in Kevin McCarthy who will do and say anything he thinks necessary to win the House Speakership and the lunatic elements such as the likes of Marjorie Taylor Green and truthfulness and honesty have become unknown concepts within the party.  Thus, it was only a matter of time before a Republican candidate such as George Santos ran for office on a totally fabricated biography where nothing he claimed was true (I have seen a few reports that suggest that even his claim of being gay may be false).  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Santos' endless lies and the silence of most of the GOP in the face of glaring lies.  Here are column highlights:

Sooner or later, the Republican Party’s devolution was bound to saddle GOP leaders with someone exactly like Rep.-elect George Santos of New York: a glib, successful candidate for high office who turns out to be pure fantasy with zero substance.

Santos, 34, who helped give Republicans their slim House majority by winning an open Long Island seat previously held by a Democrat, has admitted to “embellishing” his résumé and using a “poor choice of words” in touting his credentials. Those are understatements akin to calling the Amazon a creek or the Grand Canyon a ditch.

After initial reporting by the New York Times, journalists have discovered that, basically, Santos’s whole life story — as he sold it to voters — is a lie. He did not attend the exclusive Horace Mann Prep school in the Bronx, according to school officials. He did not graduate from Baruch College, as he had claimed. He did not climb the ladder of Wall Street success via Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, as he boasted. He is not “a proud American Jew,” as he wrote in a campaign document seeking support from pro-Israel groups, but instead considers himself “Jew-ish, as in ‘ish.’” Which apparently means not being Jewish at all.

He presented himself as the made-for-television incarnation of the vitality and diversity the Republican Party would like to project: a handsome gay Latino man, wealthy and self-made, whose very existence refuted the charge that today’s GOP shamelessly panders to racism and bigotry.

With that existence now revealed to be an illusion — with the “George Santos” voters elected shown to be a fictional character — most leading figures in the GOP have been silent. One exception is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), who defended him with tweets acknowledging that Santos lied but accusing “the left” of lying, too, although most of the examples she cited were not lies at all.

Some Democrats have called for Santos not to be seated in the new Congress; others have called for an immediate House Ethics Committee investigation. GOP leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), hoping for Santos’s vote to help him be elected House speaker, has offered no comment as to what steps, if any, the incoming Republican majority might take.

The party [the GOP] embarked on the path of make-believe politics long before Santos came onto the scene. All he did was expand the frontier.

For me, the key moment came when Republicans decided not to write a platform for the 2020 presidential election — when, in effect, they refused to tell voters what they would do if elected. They pledged only to enact whatever policies President Donald Trump might propose

The party can’t blame it all on Trump, though. In today’s GOP, a leading figure such as Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) — a cum laude graduate of Princeton University and a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School who clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist — routinely rails against smarty-pants “elites” who supposedly look down on regular folks like him.

Greene and others have shown that the way to prominence in the party is not through legislative or administrative accomplishments but via attention-grabbing displays of performative outrage.

What does it matter if what you say has no grounding in fact? By the time you get called on it, you’re off to the next over-the-top statement.

Santos’s carapace of lies is so elaborate and encompassing that it may suggest psychological issues we should hope he gets help in addressing. And there are serious legal questions about the source of $700,000 he reported lending to his campaign, with both local and federal prosecutors now said to be investigating.

But his idea of building a political career in the Republican Party on sharp-edged rhetoric and audacious lies was hardly original. Santos just took that routine further than his soon-to-be colleagues have done.