What do these stories [about serial fabulist George Santos and Solomon Pena, with 19 felony convictions and nearly seven years in the pen] have in common? They suggest a Republican Party that simply doesn't vet candidates for office anymore. Even cursory background checks or interviews would have revealed some problems with these candidates, but today's GOP doesn't seem to care. What happened? read more
The most often quoted words of civil rights giant Martin Luther King, Jr., are surely those of his 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech. Five years later, on the night before his murder, King delivered another memorable address in which he spoke of his mosaic journey to "the mountaintop" and what he beheld there. read more
Television network C-SPAN on Tuesday wrote a letter to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) requesting regular access to the House chamber, citing the positive response to its coverage of the dramatic 15 rounds of voting for the House speakership. read more
Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT), a newly elected representative from Montana, celebrated his second day in Congress with a lengthy rant about the American "Deep State" and the endangered "American cowboy." read more
The Justice Department's investigation of the Capitol attack, already the largest it has ever conducted, has resulted in 900 arrests, with the potential for scores or hundreds more to come. read more
TWINPAC
I'm actually a bit surprised Trump didn't try to surpass Nixon's Savoyard restyling of the Secret Service - www.weirduniverse.net He may have been waiting for a second term.
TWINPAC
If you haven't already seen it, you might give Moira Donegan's "Serial liar George Santos is the politician Americans deserve" at The Guardian(www.theguardian.com).
... [W]ith his boldness and deception, his shamelessness and alleged comfort with financial malfeasance, Santos, with all his lies, seems to reveal an uncomfortable truth about American politics, emphasizing what the politics writer John Ganz called "the reign of crime". Politicians, after all, lie all the time, and the Republican party in particular seems to have rapidly mainstreamed the use of fabulism, fraud and cheap scams that manipulate and extort the government, the public and the ruling elite. Are Santos's lies, after all, any more far-fetched than Trump's claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him via a vast, undetected conspiracy? Are his lies about where he worked and went to school any more nefarious than the claim that Covid vaccines kill people, or that drag queens are scheming to molest children at public libraries? Perhaps Santos's real sin is not in lying, but in telling the wrong lies. He didn't regurgitate the same fabrications as the rest of his fellow Republicans " the ones about marginalized others. Instead, he merely lied about himself. And crucially, he lied about the one thing that seems to really matter to Republican leadership: he claimed to be a member of the monied elite, when he wasn't.
Santos's fellow New York Republicans are trying to distance themselves from the congressman, calling on him to resign in the hopes that it will help their own re-election chances. "He needs help," said Jennifer DeSena, a local Republican official from Long Island. "This is not a normal person." And indeed it's hard not to suspect that there might be something wrong with the man, aside from the moral turpitude " a delusional tendency or break with reality that precipitated all these fictions. But it would be a mistake to think that George Santos's pathologies are his alone. His lies are the product of a political system that incentivizes dishonesty, punishes sincerity and is rife with opportunities for petty crooks. In that sense, Santos is the politician that we deserve.
The nonthinkers and loons are always teetering on an apocalypse of one sort or another; interestingly, it's often a doomsday they've created for themselves. Bon appetit!