A WEEK IN THE LIFE: Something seems to be wrong with George Santos!

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 18, 2023

Could something be wrong with Us? This past Monday—Monday, January 16—was a federal holiday.

Right at the start of her TV show, Nicolle Wallace alluded to that widely known fact:

WALLACE (1/16/23): Hi, everyone! It's 4 o'clock in the East. And on this day when our country celebrates the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the embodiment of the very best of what our country stands for when it's at its best, on this day of all days, it is impossible to ignore what is fast becoming arguably the worst of what this disgraced, twice impeached ex-president's party now stands for today.

We are talking, of course, about George Santos, the newly minted Republican congressman from New York whose professional resume, his education, even teeny tiny little details of his personal life have turned out to be either little white lies or outright pathological falsehoods...

Too funny! On this day when we honor Dr. King, it was impossible to avoid talking about George Santos!

Several analysts tore at their hair as Wallace opened her program. We suggested that they should instead treat themselves to a moment of mordant laughter.

Wallce quickly introduced a group of "our favorite reporters and friends." Inevitably, she and her favorite reporters and friends spent the next 39 minutes talking about George Santos—though, in fairness, Denver Riggleman was rarely able to stop talking about himself.

At 4:39 in the East, Wallace finally teased her TV show's next topic. On this day when we honor Dr. King, as on every day of the year, she and her friends would be discussing the "most prosecutable" events from January 6—that is to say, the events which might be "most prosecutable" in the case of Donald J. Trump.

Visitors, can we talk? George Santos, the newly minted Republican congressman, simply isn't a very important political figure.

He's one of 435 members of the House. In our view, it would have made much more sense, on the merits, for the House to have refused to seat him—but seated he was, and there he sits, a "teeny tiny" blip within the vast field of federal political power.

Santos isn't very important—but on a tribal basis, he's a whole lot of fun to discuss. Wallace herself had suggested that there seems to be something "pathological" about his vast array of misstatements, and at least one of her friends used that language too.

That said, no one ever suggested that something simply seems to be wrong with Santos—that he may simply be in the grip of some diagnosable psychiatric problem. Instead, the reporters and friends spent 39 minutes discussing the weird behavior of one member of the House—one completely powerless junior member out of 435.

Is something wrong with George Santos? Is he diagnosably, clinically "pathological" in some way? 

Only a few minutes had passed before the reporters and friends lit upon the latest ridiculous Santos claim which has come to light. On the day when we may forget to honor Dr. King, Wallace even played the tape of this ridiculous (though we'd also say pitiful) exchange from a New York City radio show, the ridiculous WABC’s ridiculous Sid & Friends in the Morning, 

SANTOS (2020): I actually went to school on a volleyball scholarship.

SID ROSENBERG: You did?

SANTOS: I did, yeah. When I was in Baruch, we were the number one volleyball team.

ROSENBERG: Did you graduate from Baruch?

SANTOS: Yes, I did.

ROSENBERG: So did I.

SANTOS: Oh! Very cool! Great school, great institution. Very liberal but very good professors who don’t show their bias, which is very interesting, but that’s a whole other conversation. 

But it’s funny that we went to play against Harvard, Yale, and we slayed them. 

ROSENBERG: Ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaaa!

SANTOS: We were champions across the entire Northeast Corridor. Every school that came up against us, they were shaking at the time. And it’s funny. I was the smallest guy and I’m 6-2.

[...]

SANTOS: Look, I sacrificed both my knees, and got very nice knee replacements from HSS playing volleyball. That's how serious I took the game.

ROSENBERG: That's how serious you're taking politics as well. Remember that name, "George Santos."

To listen to that inane exchange, you can just click here.

(For the record, Hospital for Special Surgery—"HSS"—is a hospital in New York City which specializes in orthopedic surgery. That said, is Santos really 6 foot 2? Does somebody have a tape measure?)

As many people know by now, Santos actually wasn't a star on the Baruch volleyball team. (At the time when Santos wasn't there, it was the strongest male volleyball team in the whole New York City area.)

In fact, Santos didn't attend Baruch University at all! Where did his claim about stardom come from? Citing Inside Edition, People magazine recently told us this:

CHAMLEE (1/13/23): The chair of the Nassau County Republican Committee said that, during his first bid for congress in 2020, Santos claimed to be a college volleyball "star" at Baruch University.

"He said he was a star and that they won the championship and he was a striker," Joseph Cairo, chair of the committee, said in a press conference Wednesday.

As Santos has since admitted, he did not attend the school. And while it's unclear exactly where his lie about playing volleyball stemmed from, Inside Edition reported that the story bears a striking resemblance to the resume of his former boss, Pablo Oliveira.

According to the outlet, Oliveira—who was Santos' boss at financial services company LinkBridge Investors—graduated from Baruch University, where he played on the school's winning volleyball team and was a two-time All-American volleyball player. A LinkedIn profile appears to back up Oliveira's resume, though little is known about LinkBridge itself.

Assuming that report is correct, Santos seems to have commandeered that part of Oliveira's life story. We would assume that such behavior is diagnosable in some way, though it may not be diagnosable by Wallace's chortling friends.

Sad! We've long suggested that people like us should consider having pity for people like Santos—for people who seem to be psychiatrically unwell.

That doesn't mean that such disordered people should be seated in the House. It doesn't mean that they should be relieved of accountability for their financial scams.

It does suggest the possibility that we shouldn't fill our tents with talk about Santos, a highly insignificant back bench member of the House. That said, Wallace devoted her first 39 minutes to Santos, saying it was impossible to do anything else on the day when our country honors Dr. King.

To us, that pretty much seemed like another moment in a week in the life. More specifically, and journalistically, it struck us as another moment in a week in the imitation of life here in our failing nation.

For us within our blue tribe tents, it's pleasing to hear about George Santos. Lots of money can be made by the corporate entities who pleasure us with such discussions.

Those entities know something else about us. 

They know that we won't sit around listening to serious talk about the lives, the interests and the happiness of our nation's black kids. For that reason, you will never hear Wallace and her bevy of friends discussing the public schools of Shaker Heights or the unimportant children within them.

During this past week in the life, this report about Shaker Heights has hung in the background of our field of vision, a bit like the way Banquo's ghost lurks about in one of Shakespeare's plays.

That flawed report about Shaker Heights went unmentioned by all concerned in this latest week in the life. We're going to get to that (admirably well intentioned) report before the end of our own current week.

Something is plainly wrong with George Santos. On the week we devote to the late Dr. King, we will pose the following question:

Something is wrong with the pitiful Santos. Also, though, could something be wrong with Us?

Tomorrow: One day after we honor King, Stormy Daniels returns!


44 comments:


  1. tl;dr

    "Too funny! On this day when we honor Dr. King, it was impossible to avoid talking about George Santos!"

    Yeah, dear Bob: too-too funny.

    ...but if we do have to talk about Mr. Santos, then shouldn't we also talk about this guy, a much bigger liar:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXv1GwkQzd0

    ReplyDelete
  2. My previous post was deleted.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Remember when the deranged troll commenter here was so sure Stormy Daniels was going to take down Trump? What a loser.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. As I recall, no one in the blog comments here suggested that Stormy Daniels would "take down" Trump. The comments were about Somerby's mischaracterization of Daniels and her lawsuit. Somerby took Trump's side and accused Daniels of being a grifter who was extorting Trump for money.

      Delete
  4. "Could something be wrong with Us?"

    Something is wrong with George Santos. No, that doesn't automatically mean there is something wrong with us. And it is a false equivalence to suggest that anything wrong on the left must be as bad as what George Santos has been doing.

    There is no obvious link between Wallace or whoever else Somerby chooses to target and George Santos, who is a criminal and a con artist embraced by the Republicans.

    This is Somerby way of attacking the left. It is specious and silly, but he goes on saying such things daily anyway.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Better trolling please.

      Delete
    2. Good self-criticism @11:02.

      Delete
    3. I don't know why on earth anyone would defend so-called liberal talking heads that revel in how wonderful they are and simply can't help talking about easy targets on the Right to make fun of in lieue of discussing other, much more relevant issues.

      The line tying the celebration of MLK's legacy to the cheap, asinine topic of mocking a cheap, asinine politician is EMBARASSING. But politics as usual of course.

      This is all very illustrative of the motivation of the energetic commentator(s) here that always defend the media and attack Somerby for having the audacity and gall to suggest that they are less than perfect.

      Delete
    4. Rant continued...

      In fact, I'm going to go ahead and suggest that by dishonoring MLK in this fashion, these talking heads AND their defender(s) here are RACIST.

      Delete
    5. @12:57 -- go listen to Wallace's show and don't take Somerby's word for what she said on it. Your comment makes no sense in the context of what the show was actually about.

      Somerby's dismissiveness about MLK day was worse than Wallace having a show about something other than MLK (and racial issues) on MLK Day.

      Delete
  5. "Visitors, can we talk? George Santos, the newly minted Republican congressman, simply isn't a very important political figure."

    What is Somerby saying today about George Santos:

    1. It is funny when Wallace talks about him. Too funny.
    2. Santos is unimportant, despite shoring up McCarthy's Republican majority to the point where McCarthy will let him say or do anything without thought of removing him.
    3. The cons and thefts and lies of Santos are mordantly funny, and Wallace is having fun talking about them -- not appalled by them as good decent people are.
    4. We should pity Santos, not try to protect our government and his constituents from his self-serving lies.
    5. No mention of Santos's ties to Russia via another Oligarch funding Republican campaigns. No mention of meddling in our elections again, by Somerby. He doesn't care about that either, apparently.
    6. No mention of Santos/Devolder's pyramid scheme in which he helped bilk people out of big money -- is that trivial too in Somerby's mind?
    7. Somerby calls for tolerance of Santos, not his removal. We should ignore him because he is only one congressman (but which elected rep is two congressmen?). What does someone have to do before Somerby would consider him important? Nuke a hurricane?

    Somerby says:

    "It does suggest the possibility that we shouldn't fill our tents with talk about Santos, a highly insignificant back bench member of the House. That said, Wallace devoted her first 39 minutes to Santos, saying it was impossible to do anything else on the day when our country honors Dr. King."

    So, Santos does a bunch of illegal and immoral things, including sell out our election process to Russia and bilk people in a pyramid scheme, but Somerby thinks it is Wallace's fault because she talked about him!

    Somerby says Wallace talked about Santos for 39 minutes on MLK Day. What did she talk about after that? Was it MLK? Somerby doesn't say. This is one way he puts his thumb on the scales. From his account, you would think that Wallace never talked about MLK on MLK Day (as Somerby said nothing about MLK himself). What did she say?

    She referred to MLK as "the embodiment of the very best of what our country stands for when it's at its best". That is more than Somerby said. Then she talked bout the shame to our nation represented by Santos. Somerby talked instead about Colbert King and selectively quoted from him to present the black community as defective because of its family structure. But today he blames Wallace for discussing Santos, who is important because he exemplifies Republican perfidy. Santos shows what the red tribe and Somerby will tolerate, while Somerby attacks the left for nitpicks such as saying 11-12 is perhaps less than a dozen. Meanwhile, Somerby urges pity for Santos (and ignores the victims of Santos's theft and deception).

    Wallace talked about Santos and the lack of shame on the right, for 23 minutes (not 39 as claimed by Somerby), then Denver Riggleman (a Republican) talked about what has happened to the party and how that relates to what happened on 1/6. Then the conversation broadened to talk about what is happening in our nation politically. And she never laughed or joked about Santos. Only Somerby thinks Santos is funny, too funny. Somerby provides no link to Wallace's show, but you can hear it here:

    https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/84589837

    ReplyDelete
  6. In recent weeks, Bob has spent 90 percent of his space on a single comment by an op Ed writer on a study he didn’t approve of. To Bob, to be sure, it related to the broader issue of not hurting white people’s feelings.
    While the comic overtones of the Santos story make it ripe for overplay, it IS important. When a well funded fraud can BS his way into Congress, a Congress at the mercy of razor thin margins, it a story. Enough play has not been given to the fact Santos flashed that creepy “OK” sign.
    Again with the insanity defense. Bob has bottomless compassion for the bottom feeders of the Right ( when he can’t quite ignore them). The people he hates? Not so much.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. More boring trolling. You're a loser.

      Delete
    2. While the troll actually admitted a little by writing "ripe for overplay" they go on to note that the Santos story may be important in as much as it effects Congress. However the media pretty much always focuses on the non-important aspects of it, and they didn't of course address this - sidestepping around the most important thing here as usual.

      Did you know this person is themself a racist? That's the real plot twist.

      Delete
    3. I hope your Russian is not as bad as your English.

      Delete
    4. Man look at the sad little Trumpies with time on there hands. It's boring to you because you sold out your Country for a freakish strongman you imagine will wipe your ass for you. "This Person," you mean Santos? I would actually reverse myself to an extent: the now more pathetic examples of Santos fibbing make the story both worse and more important. Bob Somerby has become a very unimportant blogger, and once again, time has proved him wrong,

      Delete
  7. Yesterday, Somerby seems to have adopted a new technique of criticizing his targets. He is pretending that whatever they say is hilarious, too funny, mordantly funny, even the analysts are laughing (smirking). There is no humor in anything Somerby has said, but he pretends there is some big joke.

    This is just Somerby's way of attacking, maligning, vilifying the left without having to provide any evidence of any wrongdoing. Wallace isn't joking, just as Leonnig wasn't joking yesterday. And no Leonnig wasn't minimizing either -- that is a Somerby invention. Why would she need to minimize the already small number of documents Biden retained when Trump took literally thousands of documents? That makes no sense.

    Somerby is behaving like the lazy asshole he always is. Santos is no joke, Wallace doesn't think he is and neither do any Democrats, and the Republicans are doing nothing about his crimes. And there is nothing funny about any of that.

    And Somerby has decided to target Wallace, but cannot be bothered to find any actual criticism of her work. Ha ha ha ha, she is so funny, too too funny, funny for the analysts, Somerby says. But he is the laughing stock today because his pretense only shows how empty he has come up. He is reduced today to defending scum, has no real complaint against Wallace, so he invents his own chuckles, and is clearly doing the bidding of the right, most likely for pay since today's non-essay is so forced its propaganda purpose should be obvious even to the right wing trolls here.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Pathetic, obsessive trolling. You're a total loser.

      Delete
  8. George Santos is no more a liar than anyone else telling you CRT is taught in elementary schools.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Replies
    1. True, you haven risen to that level yet. Keep working on it!

      Delete
    2. 2:17PM - Drink!

      Delete
  10. You're a psycho obsessive trolling weirdo. I feel sorry for you. Your life has to suck.

    ReplyDelete
  11. "Something is wrong with the pitiful Santos. Also, though, could something be wrong with Us?"

    Wallace is not pitiful or crazy. It is wrong of Somerby to equate the two and to imply that she has Santos-style problems when she clearly does not.

    ReplyDelete
  12. From Political Wire:

    "“The thing we have to be careful of, and I always caution myself on this and I ran into this trouble with Trump is we cannot mistake absurdity for lack of danger because it takes people with no shame to do shameful things.”

    — Jon Stewart, commenting on Rep. George Santos (R-NY)."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies

    1. Huh. Is this Mr Stewart's way of apologizing for giving medals to a neo-Nazi guy recently?

      https://orinocotribune.com/jon-stewart-and-the-pentagon-honor-ukrainian-nazi-at-disney-world/

      Delete
    2. You wouldn't know a nazi if he bit you on the big toe.

      Delete

    3. Meh. It's not complicated. If a liberal hands someone a medal -- and $100 billion worth of public money -- that has gotta be a Nazi. Or possibly an Islamic militant.

      Delete
    4. If a Republican Congressperson has a dollar. He got it from a Russian oligarch.

      Delete

    5. Whoa, "Congressperson". Jerking off while still being politically correct.

      Thanks for the laughs, dear dembot. Your dembot idiocy is sure entertaining.

      Delete
    6. Even the Republicans have elected more female members of Congress than ever before. Why is common courtesy funny to you? I guess people really are jerks in Russia.

      Delete
    7. Mao was much funnier when he cosplayed as someone who doesn't love the establishment elites. Now, he's just anther unfunny bigot, like the rest of the political Right-wing.

      Delete
  13. "Are House Republicans Just Trolling America?
    January 18, 2023 at 12:13 pm EST By Taegan Goddard

    Aaron Blake: “The new Republican House majority apparently felt it had to put Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and George Santos (R-NY) on some committees. And in picking which ones, it apparently aimed for (depending on your viewpoint) maximum irony or maximum trolling…”

    “The choice for Greene is particularly remarkable given her penchant not just for conspiracy theories, but conspiracy theories specifically involving homeland security. Indeed, her making such claims was cited as among the very reasons for her removal from committees…”

    “Santos’s appointment on the Small Business Committee might rival Greene’s installment on Homeland Security in terms of audacity (including because of things we learned just hours after it was announced). While much ink has been spilled on Santos’s lies about his background, perhaps his biggest liabilities moving forward are the questions about his dubious business and financial pursuits.”

    --------------------

    The word "trolling" seems to be over-used today. The trolls are busy calling everyone else in comments "trolls" and they are obviously doing some trolling themselves, based on the odd comments that have nothing to do with Somerby's post.

    But what does it mean when one political party has abandoned governing the country and is making moves solely to troll the other party. To be clear, it is the Republicans doing this to the Democrats and to their own constituents. Did anyone in New York elect George Santos on a white supremacist ticket? Yet there he is, flashing white supremacist gang signs and appearing on Bannon's podcast. While McCarthy is placing him on committees.

    This is nothing to laugh at. Most trolling is simply annoying, not at all funny and certainly not clever. It takes no talent to lie your head off telling lies that will be quickly discovered. That isn't "owning" anyone except yourself.

    It does seem to me that the Republicans are continuing to thumb their noses at democracy itself, at the importance of government and the role of congress in meeting the needs of the people.

    Somerby never does talk about whatever is most important in the news. His failure to address anything meaningful any more may be the surest sign of his mental deterioration over the past 8 years. But in a real sense, the House Republicans are fiddling instead of governing. They all deserve to be thrown out of office at the next election for undermining Congress from within.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Republican Party works hand in glove with Putin to undermine democratic institutions.

      Delete
    2. 3:03 you are the troll, posting disruptive content,. looking for a reaction. Pathetic but you are good at it and it gets you the attention you seek. So more power to you I guess. .

      Delete
    3. As I said, the word is over-used these days. Why shouldn't the commenters at a liberal blog redirect the conversation toward important liberal issues? That isn't considered trolling at all on most liberal blogs.

      The answer, obviously, is that Somerby is not really liberal, despite what he says.

      Delete

    4. Yes, dear bot: obviously.

      Delete
    5. That's a Corby deluxe! "My trolling ('redirecting the conversation') proves the opinions of the blogger I disagree with are not legitimate".

      LOL

      Corby, your world class troll.

      Delete
    6. It is trolling to call commenters by names that aren’t theirs.

      Delete
    7. LOL - good one. You're a loser troll.

      Delete
    8. "You're a loser troll" looks as if it'll surpass "Let's Go Brandon" as the smartest, most well-thought-out economic idea the Right has ever come up with.

      Delete
  14. Speaking of George Santos, the No More Mister Nice Blog website says:

    "THE FAR RIGHT IS A PROTECTION RACKET
    Every reasonable person in America recognizes that George Santos is unfit to serve in Congress and ought to resign. How is Santos responding to the pressure? By joining a gang:
    On his first day in Congress, Representative George Santos of New York spent most of his time alone, isolated from his new colleagues. But by week’s end, he had found his place: alongside members of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, including Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

    As a growing number of fellow Republican representatives called for his resignation, Mr. Santos dug in further, appearing last week on “Bannon’s War Room,” the podcast of Stephen K. Bannon....

    For seven minutes, Mr. Santos chatted with Mr. Gaetz, who was filling in for Mr. Bannon....

    Questions about Mr. Santos’s alignment with hard-right groups had already been raised after he attended a gala in Manhattan last month at which white nationalists and right-wing conspiracy theorists were also guests ... which was held by the New York Young Republican Club, a conservative group.

    But Mr. Santos hired the group’s executive secretary, Viswanag Burra, as his operations director....

    Mr. Burra ... has a number of ties to provocative right-wing figures. He previously worked as a producer on Mr. Bannon’s podcast and ... once worked for Mr. Gaetz.

    He also recently served as a spokesman for Carl Paladino, a Buffalo-area real estate executive and politician with a track record of racist and homophobic comments.
    We know that Santos sought the protection of Kevin McCarthy when his life of lies became public knowledge. But it's widely believed that McCarthy might not be Speaker for long, so Santos has found new allies whom no prominent Republican wants to alienate -- it might lead to being called a "RINO" or a member of "the Uniparty" on Tucker's show! -- and who'll find him work (maybe his own podcast!) even if he's forced to step down.

    The far right is, among other things, a protection racket for the ethically dubious. Affiliate yourself with it and you'll have so many supporters that no "mainstream" Republican will dare to challenge you. Matt Gaetz certainly knows that. If you're in the media, you'll have a locked-in audience that will ignore your moral failings. Think of Jeffrey Epstein associate Alan Dershowitz. Or think of Matt Taibbi, whose self-reported history of sexual misconduct destroyed his career when he published a book the same month the Harvey Weinstein story broke and the #MeToo movement went global. Taibbi is now a right-wing shill, and is untouchable. Good career move!

    Even if Kevin McCarthy is defenestrated, his successor will probably be too afraid of the wrath of George Santos's allies to ever demand the pathological liar's resignation. After that, assuming Santos makes good on his promise to step down after one term, he'll probably get a six-figure job -- for real this time -- with the New York Young Republican Club, or with some similar group, assuming he's not working full-time in the right-wing media. One way or another, he'll be set for life."

    Somerby only sees Santos as a means to flog Wallace, but we should all be more concerned about what he means in terms of Republican politics.

    ReplyDelete
  15. The only reason Republicans are proposing another rich/ corporate tax break paid for by the working class, is so economically anxious Republican voters, who most definitely aren't just bigots (hat tip corporate-owned media) get so mad, they demand we do away with the MLK holiday.

    ReplyDelete
  16. "They know that we won't sit around listening to serious talk about the lives, the interests and the happiness of our nation's black kids. For that reason, you will never hear Wallace and her bevy of friends discussing the public schools of Shaker Heights or the unimportant children within them."

    Somerby pretends to care about black children in Shaker Heights while undermining NPR's reporting on the disparity in mortality rates for black women compared to white women? Somerby expects us to believe that black children are important to him but their mothers are not?

    If I were like Somerby, I would visit that Shaker Heights story just to pick holes in it, claiming specious things to undermine that kind of school reporting (which attacks gifted programs as elitist, in the name of black kids). Then I would ask why Somerby never talks about the needs of poor black women who are pregnant and die too frequently because they don't get prenatal care, have complications that put them at risk, have poor diets and lack healthy food after giving birth, and don't give their deserving, beautiful black kids the best start in life because men like Somerby don't give a damn about women in general, and especially not about black pregnant women.

    ReplyDelete