I'm not a fraud.
I'm not a criminal
who defrauded the entire country
and made up this fictitional
character and ran for Congress.
I've been around a long time.
That's newly elected New York
Congressman George Santos
apologizing after getting
caught, lying about where he went to
high school and whether he graduated
from college and where he worked
after not graduating from college
and whether he's Brazilian or
Jewish and whether his grandparents
actually fled the Holocaust
and whether his mother died
on 9/11.
Santos is an extreme case,
but resume padding is nothing
new in Washington.
Who can forget Senator Elizabeth
Warren's fraudulent and ultimately
apologized-for claims to Native
American heritage?
I am not a person of color.
I am not a citizen
of a tribe.
She apparently even plagiarized
the Cherokee recipes
she contributed to the 1984
cookbook called Pow Wow Chow.
There's folks like Senator Dick
Blumenthal of Connecticut who lied
about serving in Vietnam during a
tight race, but well, you know,
really didn't do anything wrong.
Right?
I may have misspoken.
I did meet misspeak
on a few occasions.
And, of course, there's President
Biden who dropped out of his
1988 presidential bid
after getting caught lying about his
undistinguished academic record.
Graduated with three degrees from
undergraduate school, 165 credits,
only needed 123 credits.
Biden now concedes he did not
graduate in the top half of his law
school class, that he does not have
three degrees from college and that
he was not named outstanding
political science student.
Incredibly, he even plagiarized
the life story of a British
politician whose families were
coal miners.
Hell, I might be president now if it
weren't for the fact I said my, I
had an uncle who was a coal miner
turned out I didn't have anybody in the
coal mines, you know, I mean.
I tried that crap, you know.
When politicians invent
accomplishments and lie about their
past, it reflects poorly on their
character, and it shows of
willingness to cheat in the pursuit
of power.
But the most harmful falsehoods
that politicians tell aren't
about the scholarships they didn't
win, the wars they didn't fight
or the discrimination they didn't
overcome.
They're about the laws they passed.
Consider last summer's stupendously
misnamed Inflation Reduction Act,
which the president announced would
shrink the budget deficit and reduce
rising prices.
This bill, this bill
will reduce inflationary pressures
on the economy.
This bill will, in fact,
reduce inflationary
pressure on the economy.
Even outlets sympathetic to Biden
weren't buying that.
What the bill actually does is
create a vast number of tax breaks
and incentives aimed at greening
the economy.
It raises taxes enough to reduce
the deficit by around 300 billion,
which is just 2% of planned
borrowing over the next ten years.
It does nothing to reduce our
$30 trillion in debt.
Who's loaning the US government
those funds?
The Federal Reserve, mostly, which
pays for all those Treasury bonds by
printing money out of thin air: the
principal cause of inflation.
When he took office, the ten-year
deficit was expected to be
$12.2 trillion.
By the end of his first year, it had
climbed to a projected 14.5
trillion.
He's also misrepresented his record
on job creation, tweeting in
September that, "Right now
I have the strongest record on
growing manufacturing jobs in modern
history." As The Washington
Post Glenn Kessler pointed out,
Richard Nixon beats Biden
handily on that count with 1.3
million new manufacturing jobs
back in the early seventies, when
the country was a lot smaller,
to Biden's 630,000.
Biden also promised that it would
end his predecessor's use of Title
42 rules to keep migrants
from Latin America from entering the
country while seeking asylum
here.
His flip-flop on that has alienated
even his most ardent supporters.
Of course, Joe Biden hardly
invented political lying, especially
among presidents.
Indeed, his predecessors in the
Oval Office lied about everything,
everywhere, all at once; health
care policy; pretext for war;
and sex.
I did not have
sexual relations with that woman,
Miss Lewinsky.
From newly minted congressmen like
George Santos to the president,
we've come to expect and maybe
even accept that our politicians
are going to lie about their resumes
and their personal lives.
That is totally unacceptable.
But it's the lies about their
policies that we really
end up paying for and
that we really can't afford.