The Worst and Not So Brightest

     Fans of the first iteration of Murphy Brown (not the dreadful and ill-advised comeback season) may well remember the episode, The Best and Not So Brightest, in which Wallace Shawn's character Stuart Best decides to run for Congress out of Arizona's 7th District.

     Best won his election but not without a lot of help from ultra, super right wing groups "that have shot people in soccer stadiums". Right before the disastrous TV interview that ends his nascent political career, Best informs Brown that his "investors" want a "return on their investment" in exchange for those "$600,000 checks". 

     His position paper, in 1995, was a tour de force of comedic writing. His white supremacist supporters expected him to espouse during the television appearance positions such as deporting even legal immigrants and not just the undocumented ones. They wanted him to say that "slavery is such an ugly word" and it couldn't be denied it was beneficial to the American economy, that underage girls should be forced into arranged marriages. Pretty soon, even Best's mainstream Republican colleague turns on him.

     The Stuart Best episode was one of the best moments in the history of television and the last half of the episode was a masterpiece of over-the-top writing. And, for 1995, it was over the top, because, after all, no one would ever espouse forced, arranged marriages or deport legal immigrants, right? Bring back slavery? Outrageous!

     We were so innocent 27 years ago.

     And that brings us to George Santos, newly-elected congressman-elect out of New York-3.

     For the last several days running, Santos, proudly billed as the first openly gay Republican non-incumbent to get elected to Congress, has been embroiled in one scandal after another. The scandals involve the fact that Santos hardly said a word on the campaign trail that was factual.

     He said he worked for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. But neither bank has any record him as an employee. He said his company had lost four people in the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida until research into the lives of the nearly four dozen murdered victims revealed no connection to Santos or his business entities. He said he was Jewish before a deep dive revealed no one in his family was. And he cynically ran on being gay before it was revealed he was married to a woman. He said he was a landlord. He wasn't.

     It's difficult to understand why these revelations are coming out now and not before the election, as we saw on a nearly daily basis with Herschel Walker in Georgia. Why wait until two weeks before he's going to be sworn into the 118th Congress? How could such a complete and utter fraud, a career criminal who'd once stole a checkbook belonging to one of his mother's elderly patients in Brazil and write bad checks all over the place, get democratically voted into what used to be one of the greatest deliberative bodies on earth?

     It makes you wonder how this crook and liar is about to become one of the most powerful people on earth and why no one did any serious vetting of this guy. Why didn't the Democrats in NY-3 do any opposition research? And didn't the Republicans do any oppo research on him? It seems the Democrats fell asleep at the switch and the Republicans, even if they made a better job of it, simply ignored or were to prepared to spin his countless lies in case he was ever challenged on them.

     But he wasn't. And that's my point. And now the Democrats have to play a game of catch up that they're doomed to lose because, unlike the Stuart Best episode, there will be no do over, no recall. And New York-3 is stuck with this serial liar for the next two years.

     We dodged a bullet with Walker but not so with Santos. But the plain fact is, we've been dodging bullets that have been striking the body politic for decades. In Best's home state of Arizona, the voters had sent to Capitol Hill psychopaths like Paul Gosar, who openly canoodles with neo-Nazi white nationalists like Nick Fuentes who 27 years ago on Murphy Brown was a punchline, and Andy Biggs, a January 6 insurrectionist.

     But, fear not- Santos said he'll tell his side of the story... one week from now. It's hard to imagine what he could possibly say that'll set things right or why it would take him a week to divulge the actual facts of his life that wouldn't involve more lies that will also be easily debunked.

     The only bright spot in this parallel between America in 1995 and America in 2022 is that Arizona's 7th district is represented by Ruben Gallego, a pretty decent progressive who's slowly positioning himself to be Kyrsten Sinema's opponent two years from now. Yet the fact that such an obvious, palpable fraud like Santos is getting into the House takes away that warm fuzzy feeling that Gallego's district is in safe hands for now. That goes double for the fact that the Arizona delegation alone had already successfully shoehorned extreme right wing criminals who were once figments of the imagination of sitcom writers in the 90s and who, unlike Stuart Best, never showed the slightest amount of shame or remorse for their extreme positions.