A Tale of Two Georges

When I was in grammar school (shortly after the dinosaurs disappeared from the earth), I regularly heard the story of George Washington and the Cherry Tree.   As the story goes, when George was 6 years old, he received a hatchet for his birthday.  Apparently, there was no Consumer Product Safety Commission back then to advise what gifts were safe for kids.   George took his new toy out and chopped down a cherry tree which happened to be his father’s favorite.  Furious, George’s father, Augustine, confronted the boy, demanding to know who had cut it down.   George, already showing the integrity that would be a hallmark of his life, responded, Father, I cannot tell a lie.  It was I.  Legend has it that Augustine was so pleased with his son’s truthful response that he praised the boy and forgave his mistake.   There is no real evidence that this story in in fact true. but it was very popular with teachers and parents to teach children the importance of telling the truth.

Here we are 285 years later and we have another George at least temporarily on a path to government service, a man with an entirely different attitude toward lies.  That would be the Congressman from New York, George Santos.  Even after six years of Donald Trump and his MAGA cohorts, the case of Santos is exceptional.  If Santos’ father asked him who chopped down the cherry tree, he’d likely have replied, Father, I cannot tell the truth.  He claimed his parents fled from the Holocaust and that he was Jewish … but his parents were born in Brazil and he was raised Catholic.  He said his mother perished in the World Trade center during 9/11 but there is no evidence she was there and he later cited a different date.   He claimed that he graduated in the top 1 percent of his class at Baruch College (where he said he was a volleyball star) and had earned an M.B.A. at NYU.   Neither institution has any record of him.  He said he was an account manager at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup but they didn’t have any record of him either.  I could go on and on, but you get the point.   Nothing about him seems real.

When I was caught lying, my Mom would say, Aren’t you ashamed, Bud?  And I was.  George Santos has no shame … he either dodges questions or offers feeble excuses for his fabrications.  When asked if he would resign, he said only if the 142,000 people who voted for him asked him to do so.   Poor George … his high school equivalency education didn’t teach him that if you won your election by 145,824 (that would be the actual total, George) to 124,404, you only need to lose 20,421 votes to flip the result.  I’ll bet that many people have already said you should resign.   Besides, people didn’t vote for you, they voted for a non-existent qualified candidate that you pretended to be.   Do your country a favor, George.  Resign and go back to living with your sister.

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Tags: lies, opinion, politicians, politics

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