Santos means saint in Portuguese, which may or may not be Malaka George’s native tongue. Who can tell with this mendacious mook?

I rarely follow up on malaka of the week posts but the story has exploded since I wrote about Lying George a mere five days ago. It must feel like an eternity to him.

I’m also revisiting the Santos farce because it gave me the excuse to indulge in some Paul Simon word play in the post title. The Rhythm Of The Saints is Simon’s Brazilian music influenced album. Like Santos, Paul Simon is no saint but with songs like this, he doesn’t have to be.

Back to George Santos. He finally replied to the stories about him by admitting resume embellishment and claiming: “I’m not a criminal.”

Bad move, George. When Tricky Dick made a similar claim, it stuck with him past the grave:

In George’s case, there’s the whole check kiting thing in Brazil, which sounds like something out of a zany sitcom.

I’ll let Josh Marshall describe the action:

In 2008, when Santos was 19, he was living in Rio de Janeiro with mother, Fatima, who was working as a home health aide. In his mother’s purse George found two checks belonging to Délio da Câmara da Costa Alemão, an 82 year old man then in his mother’s care. (Fatima Devolder, Santos’s mom, later told police the man had asked her to return the checks to his bank.) George took the checks to a local clothing store where he bought shoes and clothes, identifying himself as ‘Delio’. The store clerk, Carlos Bruno Simoes, became suspicious after Santos left the store and tried calling the numbers on the checks but got nowhere. It was a big deal for Simoes since, as the guy who accepted the embezzled checks, he had to reimburse his employer for Santos’s fraudulent purchases.

 

But then Simoes caught a break.

 

According to Simoes’s account in an interview with the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, Santos had apparently given the shoes he purchased with the stolen checks to his boyfriend as a gift. A few days later the boyfriend, identifying himself as ‘Thiago’, returned to the store to exchange the shoes, apparently unaware that Santos had purchased them with stolen checks. Simoes recognized the sneakers as the ones he’d sold to ‘Delio’ days earlier and decided to follow Thiago. He tracked Thiago to a nearby store where it turned out Thiago worked and from there he was able to find Thiago’s account on the social network Orkut. On Thiago’s friends’ list he came across ‘Delio’, the man who’d passed him the bad checks days earlier. Only on Orkut he was ‘Anthony Santos’.

 

This is how Santos got caught. Simoes printed out the photos of Santos from Orkut and filed a police report. Santos was charged with embezzlement and eventually admitted to the crime. (By this time Delio had already died.) But Santos seems to have disappeared before he could go on trial. According to Brazilian press reports, the case is still open and could be recommenced if and when Santos is found. So it seems possible Santos could now face a recommenced legal action.

We’ve gone from Simon to Simoes in the blink of an eye.

I had an elaborate dream about George Santos and a casino craps table. I don’t know the rules very well but I know that snake eyes is a loser as well as the title of a movie that didn’t make the Brian DePalma Dozen.

In different political times, George Santos would have crapped out but KMac cannot afford to lose his vote for Speaker. Being a craven coward comes in handy sometimes. Besides, enabling liars is one of KMac’s specialties. Weak men gotta play to their strengths.

One would think that a man who lied about having Holocaust survivors in the family would be beyond the pale, but the GOP is the party of Marge Taylor-Greene and Jewish space lasers. Lying is their jam.

Things are so bad for Malaka George that the Murdoch owned New York Post is up in his shit. They revealed that House GOP leaders joked about Santos’ mendacity:

Senior House Republicans were so keenly aware of alleged inaccuracies and embellishments in Rep-elect George Santos’s professional biography, that the topic became a “running joke,” multiple insiders close to House GOP leadership told The Post.

<SNIP>

“As far as questions about George in general, that was always something that was brought up whenever we talked about this race,” said one senior GOP leadership aide. “It was a running joke at a certain point. This is the second time he’s run and these issues we assumed would be worked out by the voters.”

The joke was on the voters.

I’ll be keeping tabs on the Santos story as it develops. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a two-fer: I get to mock Malaka George *and* KMac. For them, it’s a crapshoot. For me, it’s a sure thing.

The last word goes to Charlie Byrd followed by James Harman: