The web of lies Rep. George Santos (R-NY) has spun about himself has been well-reported. But according to Politico's Jack Shafer, Santos' habit of embellishing details seems to be a rising in trend in the GOP.
Shafer gives the examples of Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), who allegedly misled people about her ethnicity and her upbringing and being a victim of crime, and Andy Ogles (R-TN) who falsely claimed to be an economist, exaggerated his career as a reserve sheriff’s deputy, and inflated his education.
"Is a 'Fib your way to Congress' trend emerging? Do the Santos, Luna and Ogles stories mark a failure of the press to fully vet candidates before Election Day? Or have candidates always embellished their pasts and gotten away with it until the Internet made it cheap and speedy to check their records? Or does this mini-epidemic of resume packing and fictionalized autobiographies point to something more revelatory — that everybody does it and accurate resumes and personal histories don’t matter when it comes to electing politicians?" Shafer writes.
Shafer also points out that President Joe Biden has had his own problems with the truth during his public career. Biden has lied about his family history and his academic achievements, "about getting arrested while trying to visit Nelson Mandela in prison; about getting arrested for protesting civil rights; about getting arrested for sneaking into the U.S. Capitol; about getting shot at inside Baghdad’s Green Zone; about pinning a Silver Star on a Navy Captain in Afghanistan; about cutting the federal deficit in half" ... the list goes on. Biden's lies obviously pale in comparison to Donald Trump's. Fact checkers have found that Trump made at least 30,573 false or misleading comments during his four years in the White House alone.
But Trump has shown that voters care less about the truth than journalists. "The only lies politicians must avoid are the ones that might trigger legal proceedings against them, like the iffy campaign finance statements Santos filed that have spurred investigations and might result in prosecution," Shafer writes.
Read the full article over at Politico.
