Alex Brandon/AP Photo
Rep.-elect George Santos (R-NY) listens during the eighth round of voting in the House chamber as the House meets for the third day to elect a Speaker and convene the 118th Congress, January 5, 2023, in Washington.
The revelation that George Santos is not remotely who he said he was may be the most overcovered political event of my lifetime. In a nutshell: “A Republican congressional candidate got elected in 2022 by telling a lot of lies.” Stop the presses!
And yet the story dominated both mainstream and social media for two full weeks. I get it. Santos lied in a lot of funny ways. He killed off his mother twice, at least on Twitter (which, of course, was “bad news for Biden”). He claimed to be “Jew-ish” (and not in the way Bruce Springsteen is). He exploited the Holocaust, etc. Would the Republicans have won that seat with a candidate who told the truth about themselves? Well, it may be true that not all Republican candidates lie about their backgrounds. And the truth might have cost them the seat had it broken in time for the election. But remember: Republicans do not run on their own policies, backgrounds, or ideas. They run, exclusively, on the hatred that the MAGA movement and its slavish supporters in the Republican Party and right-wing media-sphere gin up against the kind of people who read (and write) Altercation. And it often works.
Take the case of another rising Republican star from New York, Elise Stefanik. As The New York Times reported, the same month she hosted a fundraiser for Santos, she also “attacked ‘the White House, House Dems, & usual pedo grifters’ for failing to address the nationwide infant-formula shortage, a seeming allusion to the QAnon mythos. In 2021, as a surge of Haitian migrants sought to cross the border into Texas, she ran a series of Facebook ads warning that Mr. Biden would ‘grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants’ to ‘overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.’” When positioned next to this lunatic, liar, racist, and conspiracy nut, Santos is practically Beaver Cleaver in comparison.
These lies are far more consequential than the one about when Santos’s mother gave up the ghost (if he even had a mother). Countless stories have been written about whether the Republicans will stick with him. Why shouldn’t they? After all, they’ve all learned to walk away fast when being asked about the latest crazy thing Trump said. A subset of this question appears to be whether Jewish Republicans will continue to invite him to their parties—they won’t, but neither will they call on him to resign. (When you think about it, it’s kind of a compliment to American Jews that now gentiles are lying to pretend to be one of us, rather than the other way around.)
Anyway, the deceit and demagoguery are baked into our contemporary political calculus. Today’s Republican Party, as Ms. Stefanik’s success demonstrates, has been shown the light by Donald Trump, with estimates of around 30,000 times that he concocted lies. There are no lies the GOP will not embrace so long as they are being told about the many types of people they have come to hate and fear.
The real scandals here are in the failure of the mainstream media to do any due diligence on the candidate. The tiny North Shore Leader had much of it but was ignored in the places that could have made it matter. Long Island’s Newsday is the prime culprit, as it should have owned this story. But the Times had every reason to dig deeper as well. They were too concerned with telling us, pointlessly, and incorrectly, who was going to win than with giving voters the information they needed to make informed choices about who should win. The sad truth is that most political reporters write to impress other political reporters; citizens are an afterthought, if a thought at all. And they have decided that no matter how crazy, irresponsible, dishonest, and dangerous the Republicans behave, they will continue to treat the parties as equally legitimate and credible. One has to laugh at quotes like this one: Mr. Santos “demonstrated he doesn’t have a grasp on the truth,” sadly, quoted straight-faced by a New York Times report on Santos’s first day in the House.
Congratulations also to the Times political team for, in its coverage of Santos, winning the award for “Worst Both Sides Comparison of 2022” with this last-minute entry. In it, we learn that Democrats do not always tell the truth either. Ready? Well, “Joseph R. Biden Jr. admitted to overstating his academic record in the 1980s: ‘I exaggerate when I’m angry,’ he said at the time. Hillary Clinton conceded that she ‘misspoke’ in 2008 about dodging sniper fire on an airport tarmac during a 1996 visit to Bosnia as first lady, an anecdote she employed to highlight her experience with international crises. And Senator Elizabeth Warren apologized in 2019 for her past claims of Native American ancestry.” (This stupid column by The Washington Post’s right-wing pro-torture pundit Marc Thiessen belongs in its own category, of course. But it is at least not masquerading as “news.”)
In We Are Not One news, well, once again, I regret to say that there’s not much save for the fact that The New Yorker was good enough to add it to their “Best Books of 2022” list after that list was completed, because the book was not published in time to make it. So, thanks very much for that. Remember they said “fearless” and “scrupulous” …
Logrolling in our Time: Meanwhile if you are going to buy and read one book published by Basic Books this year, it should be mine. If you are going to buy and read two, however, may I recommend Myth America, edited by my good friend, the scarily productive Julian Zelizer, and the profession’s champion Twitterer, Kevin Kruse. Its only weakness is that I’m not in it.
I saw what I thought was a nearly perfect Broadway musical over the holidays: Some Like It Hot, which will likely be playing for years at the Shubert Theatre. Like virtually all sentient human beings, I love the 1959 Billy Wilder film upon which it is (extremely loosely) based, which showcases not only Wilder’s undeniable brilliance as a director but also the much underrated acting and comedic talents of Marilyn Monroe. This play has neither. And to be honest, even though it’s a near-perfect musical, its music, while functional, is not all that memorable. What it does have is a smart, fun “book,” made relevant to our world by its emphasis on racial inclusion and gender fluidity; some wonderful, memorable performances; a terrific big band; and all of the above joined together with literally breathtaking choreography.
Yes, it’s rather self-consciously “woke” about non-binarism—going so far as to pause for audience applause when the appropriate pronouncements are made. But the damn thing is so cleverly written, acted, staged, and ultimately executed, it’s a small price to pay. (And if Adrianna Hicks, who plays the role of “Sugar,” was not a star before this play, she is one now.) It’s two and a half hours of, as the saying goes, “Broadway magic,” and I think even a gay Jew-ish Republican who twice lost his mother would leave with a genuine smile on his face (and might want to claim he wrote, directed, and starred in it). Anyway, if you even like Broadway musicals—and have the money—you will love this thing. Trust me; no critical race theory or even thinking necessary.
Bonus: Here is a terrific essay on Wilder by Andrew O’Hagan from The New York Review of Books, last February.
When I step into Birdland just northwest of Times Square, I always feel like I’m in one of those clubs that rich people are always going to in one of those Cary Grant/Myrna Loy–type 1940s screwball comedies. That such a place is still going strong is a tribute to my city, even if sometimes it’s filled not with beautiful people in evening dress but tourist families in, ahem, ugly Christmas sweaters.
Actually, the music and the sweaters (and the movies, of course) are just about the only things about Christmas to which I do not say “Bah, humbug.” This year, when, for the third time in three years, I caught its “Swinging Christmas” celebration, sweaters were in, um, full swing. So, of course, was the music. Klea Blackhurst, Jim Caruso, and Billy Stritch mixed the schmaltz with the chops and some un–New Yorky humor that makes their show dependable fun for one and all. After the show, I suggested to Stritch that they maybe include Tom Lehrer’s “Hannukah in Santa Monica” in the future. He said, “But none of us are Jewish.” I replied, “You’re New Yorkers now. That makes you at least part Jewish.” (Note to George Santos: This might have worked.)
This past Tuesday night, I returned to see the first set of a four-night, eight-set stand by Joe Lovano and his ten-piece “Streams of Expression” band celebrating Joe’s 70th birthday this past December 29. Joe looks like the kind of hipster you’d cast in a ’50s movie as a jazz beatnik, but he plays as if he’s incorporated all the music that’s been made ever since, while at the same time never losing track of either the melody or the groove. Seeing the band’s first set of the stand was actually quite interesting, because it felt as if they were just learning how to talk to one another, musically, on songs that they will be further working out for the rest of the seven shows. Sitting in that wonderful (and not overpriced) restaurant, it felt like this is what jazz—and New York—should be. More here.
And here’s a whole show by Joe.
