Poseur

CNN:

“No, I was not a drag queen in Brazil, guys. I was young, and I had fun at a festival.”

[so said the same person still seemingly posing and having fun at the 118th U.S. Congress fest serving on] the Committee on Small Business and the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

Santos had privately lobbied GOP leaders to serve on two more high-profile committees, one overseeing the financial sector and another on foreign policy, but top Republicans rejected that pitch as some chairmen balked at adding him to their panels,…

[foreign policy committee? hmmm, thinking of his foreign campaign donor or mere coincidence?]

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17 thoughts on “Poseur”

  1. conspiracy theories surrounding questionable donations to GOPer critters piling up alongside their many dead vaccine doubters

  2. seen from a different angle, Prof. Jennifer Finney Boylan’s Opinion | George Santos’s denial was a real drag – The Washington Post

    My first thought, when I read that, during his salad days, Rep. George Santos had seemingly performed as a drag queen, was, “Finally! Something about him that’s appealing!”
    But almost as soon as the news broke that our favorite congressional dissembler apparently had a former life as “Kitara Ravache,” he felt it necessary to step forward and deny the whole thing.
    I don’t know what disappointed me more, the possibility that he might never have really been a drag performer or that, if true, he felt it necessary to deny it. (On Saturday, Santos admitted to dressing as a woman but denied being a drag queen, telling reporters: “No, I was not a drag queen in Brazil, guys. I was young and I had fun at a festival. Sue me for having a life.”)
    Why, I wondered, did Santos (R-N.Y.) feel so strongly to respond to this particular controversy? What was there about wearing a dress that was somehow more shameful than, say, lying about the Holocaust, or making up stories about 9/11?
    […]
    But the congressman said that the claims were “categorically false” and added that he would not be “distracted nor fazed by this.”
    Previously, when confronted with a long string of fabrications, from claiming that he was a volleyball star at a college he never attended to his tale about having worked at Goldman Sachs, he never felt it necessary to respond with much more than, “I have my story to tell and it will be told next week.” Which he never really got around to doing.
    But an accusation that he once performed in drag — which would put him in the perfectly normal company of Rudy Giuliani — this, apparently, could not stand.
    For me, looking upon that photo — in which the person shown, let the record show, looks fantastic — it is impossible not to think of the Chico Marx (not Groucho) line, “Who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”
    My disappointment that Santos found it necessary to disavow something that, unlike his lies, should really be no source of shame, went deeper the more I thought about it. There’s a trope about “deceit” in the national conversation around transgender people — that we are somehow not what we appear to be, that we are going through the turmoil of transition not to find a sense of hard-won authenticity but instead as part of some kind of imaginary plot to harm the womenfolk.
    Santos isn’t trans, but it can’t be good to have this new element folded into the larger story of the congressman as a liar and a deceiver. It’s exactly this trope that has done people like me so much harm.
    It also doesn’t help that my fellow progressives are finding so much merriment in the Santos drag story. The amusement, on the surface, is about busting him, once again, for his hypocrisy, and if so: fair enough. But there’s something deeper and meaner in the laughter, too, I think, as if the one thing that might bring Republicans and Democrats together is their shared disdain for a man in a dress.
    It’s Republicans, though, who are attempting to turn that disdain into national policy. In a season in which the GOP appears to have no policy agenda besides obstruction, opposition to drag queens appears to be one of the few things that the current Republican Party actually believes in.
    […]
    With the latest twist of his story, George Santos had an opportunity to make people think well of him again. He might have said, “It’s true I did drag in my younger days; that was a fun time and I want everyone to know that I support everyone’s right to pursue their dreams, whether they are part of my LGBTQ community or part of some other marginalized group still seeking full equality under the law.”
    He could have said that, and for a single moment, won back a little of the respect he’s lost since his election.
    But he didn’t. Because the crowd he seeks to join has no place in their hearts for anyone who is different. Because the crowd he seeks to join is less interested in legislation than destruction. Because the crowd he seeks to join isn’t really all that concerned with whether the things it says are true.
    No lie.

  4. But the congressman said that the claims were “categorically false” and added that he would not be “distracted nor fazed by this.”

    With so many things to distract or faze Santos (?) I can understand why “this” is what he’d choose to not be distracted or fazed by. Of course people with cellphones and microphones might think this is a perfectly legitimate distraction. 

    And Diamond -unvaccinated- contracted Covid and died from … something. Too bad. I wonder who thought it would be a good idea to have Dumbass deliver a homily at her memorial service? Someone who never heard him speak perhaps? And they couldn’t fill a 2400 seat hall – even with Dumbass headlining?  Fat Elvis just don’t pull ‘em in like he used to.

  5. So Joe Scarborough wants ashes and sack cloth from Biden over the documents. As if that will stop the false equivalence. 

  6. if his name isn’t “George Santos”, but that was the name on the ballot, then he wasn’t elected

  7. Wouldn’t it be nice to think so.
    –E. Hemingway
    From Short Story of the Week:
    “Hills Like White Elephants”
    by Ernest Hemingway

    (Quote is from memory, so may be smidgen different. )

  8. sturge, thanks for the KO link.  i agree with his

     “I do not believe Joe Biden and/or his team mishandled any classified documents. Unfortunately, it’s clear Joe Biden and/or his team mishandled the messaging, the process, and the narrative.”.

    most likely it’ll be discovered those classified docs were no longer classified by the time they were packed up. 

    however, if some are still classified, were they from the days surrounding his son’s dying and death when veep joe only worked from home on an official basis and was/is there still a SCIF set up at the home?

    until intel and fbi folk declare the condition and the absence of security risk, it will be hard for WH to issue any definitive clarification…. and at that it will be difficult to undo the harm already done.

  10. others’ thoughts on the question:

    Is Congressman-Elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) a U.S. Citizen? (cis.org)

    […]
    Santos, according to Daily Kos, has variously described himself as the son of Brazilian immigrants, and as a native of Brazil. (One could, honestly, describe oneself as the child of immigrants while being an immigrant oneself). He has also said that he was born in New York’s Flushing Hospital on July 22, 1988. (There is a hospital by that name, and it was in business in 1988, but its media relations phone is never answered.)
    If he was born abroad to alien parents, he could qualify for the House, according to the Constitution, if he has been naturalized at least seven years prior to his election.
    The Daily Kos points out that lying about one’s citizenship can lead to deportation. To my knowledge, no member of the House or the Senate has ever experienced deportation.
    Other media, which have paid extensive attention to Santos’ numerous lies and questioned where he, a two-time evictee for non-payment of rent, got the $700,000 he said he lent to his own campaign, have not paid attention to the place of his birth. He could solve this matter by simply producing a birth certificate, which I have not seen reported.
    Checking on a birth certificate for someone else is impossible in the City of New York; if you want to know about a New York birth, you are told that you must apply for a birth certificate; as you move in that direction you discover that only if you are the former baby in question, or a member of that ex-baby’s family, can you apply. Data sources like Ancestry provide birth certificate information, but only for some states (e.g., Texas), but not for New York and others.

  11. and in other news

    It’s only been 9 years. The new season of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver premieres February 19.

  12. if a fan, click here for oliver’s visit with fallon last week where

    John Oliver talks about why he isn’t a fan of New Year’s Eve parties, hanging out with Meryl Streep at a Clooney Foundation event and celebrating Season 10 of Last Week Tonight.

  13. the wheels of justice turn slowly but exceedingly fine. — Sun Tzu

    Alleged Jan. 6 rioter photographed in Pelosi’s office convicted of 8 counts – The Washington Post

    […]
    After nine days of testimony and legal arguments in the trial, the panel began deliberating Monday morning and reached guilty verdicts on all eight counts against Barnett, including four felonies, in less than two hours.
    The most serious charge he faced, obstructing an official government proceeding, carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. But advisory sentencing guidelines used by the court are likely to recommend a much shorter term in his case.
    […]
    Besides obstructing an official proceeding, Barnett was convicted of two felonies related to carrying a dangerous weapon in the Capitol and a felony charge of civil disorder. The four misdemeanors he was convicted of included theft of government property, meaning the envelope.

  14. And the hits just keep on coming. WaPo.  

    Four Oath Keepers found guilty of Jan. 6 seditious conspiracy

    Four members of the far-right Oath Keepers group were convicted of seditious conspiracy Monday, joining founder Stewart Rhodes in being found guilty by a jury of plotting to keep President Donald Trump in power by force.
     
    Seditious conspiracy charges are rarely used and even more rarely successful, making the verdict a significant victory for the Justice Department. Of the nearly 1,000 people charged with committing crimes at the Capitol on Jan. 6, only 14 were charged with seditious conspiracy, identified by the Justice Department as not just participants in a violent mob but leaders using brutality to further a political plot. In November, the same prosecution team failed to convict three associates of the Oath Keepers of the crime.
     
    At Rhodes’s trial only he and Florida Oath Keepers leader Kelly Meggs were found guilty of conspiring to commit sedition, while three associates were convicted of less politically loaded felonies that did not require plans to use force. The Oath Keepers verdict — which came after the jury deliberated for about 13 hours — comes as five members of the Proud Boys face trial down the hall on seditious conspiracy charges.
     
    Joseph Hackett, 52, ; Roberto Minuta, 38; David Moerschel, 45 and Edward Vallejo, 64, were all also convicted Monday of obstructing lawmakers and Congress generally and conspiring to do the same. Hackett was convicted of destroying evidence by deleting it from his devices, while Minuta and Moerschel were acquitted on that charge. Hackett and Moerschel were acquitted of responsibility for damaging the Capitol’s historic Columbus doors.

    The Oath Keepers were described by federal prosecutors as armed and dangerous traitors, and by their attorneys as hapless has-beens who stumbled into chaos.
     
    “They claimed to wrap themselves in the Constitution, but they trampled it,” prosecutor Jeffrey Nestler said in closing arguments. “They ignored the will of the people,” he said, but “had the audacity to claim to be oath-keepers.”
    [,,,]

    As the old saying goes, it takes two (in this case four) to tango.  When the best defense your attorney can come up with is that you’re a hapless has-been who stumbled into chaos you’d better be prepared for a bad outcome.

  16. 72 and 67
    What’s up that boomers are committing mm this year? 
     
    The SOTU is Feb 7th. How many more shootings will Joe have to talk about by then?

    Sturg – Thanks for posting the KO link. I wish he’d go back to baseball commentary, too.

    Rain on the way to Dallas. Bob might actually get snow.

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