Chapter 1: Parties1 PARTIES UNQUALIFIED SUCCESS Name almost any job: dental hygienist, rodeo clown, dog walker, mall Santa, chicken-sexer--they all demand some kind of definable skill set. The one exception is member of Congress. You can be in jail and get this job. You can be deranged and get this job. If you have a heart attack, they just let your wife start doing it. All you need is a smile and a flag pin. I''d say all you need is a pulse, but dead people have been elected to Congress; much more is required of an immigrant taking the citizenship test. In forty-eight states you can''t vote if you''re in prison, but in every state, you can run for Congress from prison.
Unremarkable people can get a remarkable life in Congress, and that''s what keeps the average backbencher sticking with party-dictated bullshit. It guarantees them something that''s bigger than faith, family, country or objective reality: they get to keep the best job they could ever get with absolutely nothing to recommend their lazy, ignorant ass for it. College degree? You don''t even need a high school degree. Lauren Boebert didn''t get one, and she sits on the Budget Committee. If she wasn''t in Congress, she could probably get a shift at a truck stop, dusting the jerky. But then she wouldn''t have two paid-for offices, one in DC, one in her district. She wouldn''t have a staff that answers the phone for her and kisses her ass all day. No one would put her on TV and ask her opinions.
She couldn''t go on exotic paid-for trips--I mean, fact-finding missions. If you want to know what is so great that it can make someone say anything they''re told to say, it''s this: the title, the office, the staff, the attention, the good table at the restaurant. "Congressperson" is literally the only job in the world you can get with so much prestige and so many perks while being a complete doofus with absolutely no skills, knowledge or qualifications. Mike Johnson, I guess, could mop up puke at the Sonic, but it would take him all day. But in Congress, puke-mopper Mike Johnson is a big deal. A man of respect. When he walks in and asks for the best table, they know what to say: "Sir, this is PetSmart, the Cheesecake Factory is next door." A job in Congress is just so much better than racking the weights at CrossFit, which is what Marjorie Taylor Greene did before she set her crazy eyes on the prize.
And once you''ve got the gig, it''s yours for life. The reelection rate in the House for incumbents in 2022 was 95 percent--that''s better job security than a pedophile priest has. In 2022, a video went viral of a Walmart employee quitting her job very publicly. She got on the PA and let it all out: "Fuck this company, fuck this position, and fuck that big lazy bitch Chris Price, I fucking quit!" Texas representative Chip Roy also once told Congress to take his job and shove it. He said: "This institution is a sham. And we should adjourn and shut this place down." But Chip Roy will never quit. Because there are no other jobs where a moron gets paid to ride around in a limo.
Chip gets paid a hundred and seventy-five grand a year, free medical, a great pension, with half the year off, plus a million-and-a-half-dollars-a-year "allowance" for decorating the office, or, um, "sundries." Oh, also: Lobbyists blow him. And he gets to be on TV for doing nothing, which as we all know, is the American dream. And by "doing nothing," I mean literally. Once you get elected, you don''t have to actually do anything. There''s no year-end performance review. Nobody calls you into an office and says, "I don''t think this is working out." You have, essentially, no boss.
Well, except for the voters. That''s the one thing you must do to keep all these perks coming: if your district is full of people who think the election was rigged, or vaccines have microchips in them, or men can have babies, you have to agree, and then repeat it in Congress. And they do. Nancy Mace is a House member from South Carolina, the first woman to graduate from the Citadel. After January 6, she was outraged and stood up to her party, giving a dozen interviews in a single day condemning Trump. Soon after, she wouldn''t even talk about it. Then she voted to oust Liz Cheney for making the exact same case she herself had made. A lot of people in America think she''s a patriot, but she looks to me like a supplicant for the corner office.
She supported an insurrection for the "likes." OWNING THE FIBS George Santos is the somehow-elected Republican House member from Long Island who represents a growing segment of American society: liars. Now, if you''re sort of hazy on the details of Santos''s life, don''t worry, so''s he. When they film his biography, it''ll start with "Based on a false story." He lied about his schooling, his career, his sexuality, his charity work--what kind of family raises a person like this? We don''t know because he lied about them too. He lies like a goose shits--if he''s not doing it that very moment, he''s about to. Santos said he attended the prestigious Horace Mann prep school; they have no record of him. Nor does NYU, where he said he got an MBA, or Baruch College, where he falsely claimed to have graduated in the top 1 percent of his class and starred on the volleyball team.
I''d say you can''t make this shit up, but he just made this shit up. And it raises a lot of questions, starting with: If you''re going to lie, why volleyball? He also claimed he ran an animal charity that neutered three thousand stray cats. He didn''t, but again, what a strange thing to brag about. OK, so it''s easy to make fun of George Santos, but we shouldn''t be missing the bigger picture with him--because this man has pioneered something completely new in American politics. Of course, we''ve seen liars before, but it was always about tacking from the fringes to the center of your own party--what Mitt Romney called "shaking the Etch A Sketch." Santos, however, is the first to realize that since we are all in our hermetically sealed media bubbles now, you can pretend to be everything to voters in both parties, and no one on either side will notice. Some of Santos''s lies appeal to far-right Republicans, like being all in on Trump''s election denying. Or making the white power sign in the halls of Congress.
Or claiming he was a Wall Street wunderkind who made millions working at Goldman Sachs, which, of course, he didn''t, or that he was a luxury yacht broker, which, of course, he wasn''t. But Santos''s district is not a Republican district: Biden won it by eight points. So how did a Trump-loving, election-denying white nationalist get elected in a Democrat-leaning district? Simple--he told them what they wanted to hear too. Liberals love identity politics and victimhood, so George said he had a brain tumor. He also said he was one of the first New Yorkers hospitalized for Covid. He said he lost four coworkers in the famous Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016. George has said he''s from Brazil, which is overwhelmingly Catholic, but when he ran in New York he said he was Jewish and that his grandparents fled Ukraine to escape the Nazis. That''s right, his Jewish Ukrainian forefathers escaped the Holocaust by being born Catholic in Brazil.
His immigration policy is "We must stop people like me from getting into this country." Also, he claims to be half Black, although I doubt it''s the half that wears a blazer with a fleece vest. Oh--and he''s gay. Or at least he is since he divorced the woman he was married to up until two weeks before the campaign started. Yes, George knows where the sweet spots are with Democrats too. He once said, "I''m very much gay." What does that mean, "very much gay"? You have a blue checkmark on Grindr? For Republicans, George bragged that he "personally attended the insurrection" on January 6 and tweeted hashtags like #DemsAreDestroyingAmerica. But that obviously didn''t matter to plenty of Democrats in his district.
What mattered is that he''s a brave, sad, proudly gay, half-Black, Latino Holocaust victim. With a brain tumor. Vote for him? I''m surprised they didn''t have him host the Oscars. Everybody keeps asking, "How could a guy like this happen?" I''ll tell you how: because no one cares anymore about substance. It''s all tribalism. The only thing that matters is "Is he on our team?" "Is he doing our schtick?" Santos is just the first one to realize you could do both sides'' schtick and get away with it because people have completely tuned out anything that doesn''t already fit their narrative. Republicans love a winner, and Democrats love someone whose life story makes you want to kill yourself. WORLD WAR ME America in our current age suffers acutely from a particular disease of the mind, which is: everything proves what we already believed, and everything goes back to the thing we already hate.
All issues today, from pandemic to war, become a stress test for our reflexive partisanship: Can you take a vastly complex situation that is 100 percent not about your thing and somehow still make it about your thing? And our answer is: watch me. Americans will put anything new in our mouths and nothing new in our heads. So naturally Republicans blamed Putin''s invasion of Ukraine on Biden being the worst president ever, and Democrats blamed it on Trump''s being the worst president ever. Which he was; there is that. But I''m not sure I can follow Biden''s logic all the way when he dragged January 6 into this by saying, "Look, how would you feel if you.