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I find it amusing to watch Mittens clutch his pearls over Santos, the very quintessence of what the Republican Party has been building toward since at least 1976: a party that will say or do anything to gain power.
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Mitt Romney stands for a lot of terrible things but he wasn’t one of the driving forces pushing the Republican party to become an ever worse version of itself. He is as close a thing as the Republican party has seen to a sensible moderate in a generation.
Literally no Senator in the history of the United States voted to impeach and convict a President from his own party before Romney did.
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I agree that Romney is one of the last “good” Republicans holding a federal office, but … so what? Even if you replaced the GOP half of the current Congress with clones of Romney, in 30 years, you’ll still end up with a room full of Trumps, MTGs and George Santoses.
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There’s also the campaign finance fraud and the use of campaign funds for money laundering.
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Frankly? Not really. The devil has enough advocates, so I won’t be his.
I just think it’s rich that Romney thinks he should be the arbiter of who should be elected in a democracy. In my perfect world, they’d be cellmates for wholly different crimes.
I don’t want a system where rich billionaire criminals like Romney are the arbiters of who belong in congress. Neither of them should be there, and there absolutely are even worse people there than Santos. Actual merchants of death.
Like him or not, Romney is not wrong that Santos got into the office via fraud. In addition to his lies about who he is, there seems to be some real fucked up shit going on with how he funded his campaign.
Which is beside the point. And there has been talk about him getting Russian oligarch money. So, there’s that, too. He seems to be connected to people looking to bring down democracy. 
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Little late for that concern, yo.
Exactly.
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It seems weird to think that we can’t talk about Santos, because there might be worse people in congress… well YEAH… Doesn’t mean that Santos should be in congress or that it’s not indicative of larger problems in congress and in our elections more generally.
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Unfuck 'em both, says I.
Mittens can have his broken clock moment; that in no way negates his own awfulness.
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And I don’t really remember any of us saying that, either, although apparently, we’re all just following whatever shiny rage stories the media puts out there for us 
Here I was thinking we were all a bit more thoughtful than that! Clearly, we’ve been found wanting, as if we don’t have tons of threads that get into all sorts of deep discussions on all aspects of our national and global political landscape!
I also would say that the election of Santos most certainly indicates a new level of problems with our elections, that someone basically lied their way into office with incredibly shady money. Santos is a symptom of the very people that some are preferring we talk about instead of Santos, most likely, who have broken the system for their own benefit. These are not disconnected issues, rather he’s the logical outcome of dark money flowing into the system unaccountably, and of people blindly supporting “their side” no matter what. The fact that the GOP did not do any sort of vetting of Santos and that no one can figure out where the money comes from shows just how broken shit is…
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… well actually 
he’s only a hectomillionaire
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I’m actually generally against the expulsion of members for a similar reason, but I actually think an analogy to the idea of free markets applies here. We appreciate markets as a means of expressing our choices and, setting aside my critiques of capitalism for a bit, a market should be defined by the free choices of the participants. But quickly in a market we see that some people will lie to gain a favorable market position. In fact, because lying is easier than providing better services, unchecked lies in the market will drive out good actors in favor of bad, which is why we have fraud laws. We’ll accept a certain amount of flexing the truth, puffery in ad copy, but come down hard on falsehoods. Santos made the same leap from flexing the truth to discarding it entirely.
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Romney isn’t pretending to be any such arbiter. I’m sure there are lots of people Romney doesn’t like in congress, but he still respects the choices of the voters that put them there. The people who voted in Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz and Ted Cruz made terrible decisions but they knew more or less what they were getting, or at least had every opportunity to learn what they were getting.
George Santos is different because he attained his position by deceiving the voters into believing they were voting for a fundamentally different person with fundamentally different qualifications.
It’s the difference between regretting a hire because they turned out to be lazy and regretting a hire because they made up every single goddamn thing on their resume.
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Not all of them. It is a big tent of bastards, after all. 
When I was searching for details of his conflicting claims of citizenship, one of the top results was an article digging into it from Center for Immigration Studies, a “nativist” organization founded by dead eugenics racist John Tanton.
https://umbraxenu.no-ip.biz/mediawiki/index.php?title=Category:Center_for_Immigration_Studies
I won’t link to them, but the main claims were:
- American through parents.
- American by birth in Queens.
- Naturalized.
- By marriage.
The first two are dubious, and the last two have really tight timing on the seven years even if his paperwork got express same-day processing that nobody ever gets.
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The source is known for flat out making shit up to cater to neo-nazis. None of their claims can be trusted.
From Media Bias / Fact Check
“Overall, we rate CIS a questionable source based on publishing misleading information (propaganda) regarding immigration”
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I’m sure it’s also a vigorous that will bring the truth to light. Just kidding. I’m sure the republicans in that committee will do everything they can to sweep it all under the rug.
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I wholeheartedly agree. And just to make sure it’s clear, I think we absolutely should talk about Santos.
What I want to make clear here is that the people that should be deciding who goes to (and who gets dragged out of) an elected body should really be the American people.
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Yes, I know. I did do a wiki page on them.
In this case, they were citing neutral sources with links: NYT, etc. (Possibly why Google was ranking their page so high, but I’ve given up wondering why Google does what it does.)
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