Peggy “High” Noonan devotes her weekly Wall Street Journal column to the case of Rep.-elect George Santos. Noonan might have gone into a trance and produced it via automatic writing. On second thought, she probably didn’t need to go into a trance to produce it, but I’ll stick with the automatic writing part. She gives us the predictable screed in “Why George Santos’s lies matter.” She advises the GOP: “They can’t afford to keep him. He is a bridge too far. He is an embarrassment.” The Journal turns over a lot of editorial page real estate to Noonan on a weekly basis for this kind of wisdom.
Francis Menton takes a slightly different angle at his aptly named Manhattan Contrarian site. Beginning where Noonan begins, Menton moves on to consider “a bunch [of political liars] I think are worse. The funny thing about these, though, is that not a single Democrat seems to care about them. All involve current officeholders, who are not subject to any widespread demands that they resign. Let’s consider.”
Menton cites Ilhan Omar as Exhibit A, though he gets the year of her election to Congress wrong. She was elected to succeed Keith Ellison — another champion liar — in 2018 (Menton says it was 2016). Anticipating Omar’s election to the Minnesota state legislature in the fall of 2016, I summarized the circumstantial evidence of Omar’s misconduct in the City Journal column “The curious case of Ilhan Omar.” Writing for Power Line over the past 20 years I’ve got a lot of things wrong, but Omar’s curious case is one thing I’ve gotten right. I revisited it last week in this context in “The Santos clause & an addendum.”
Menton proceeds to consider Senators Richard Blumenthal and Elizabeth Warren as well as President Biden. He titles his column “One of the all time worst political liars” and concludes: “[T]the remarkable thing is the extent to which the media protect and cover for conduct of Democrats that is far more egregious than what Santos has done, including criminal conduct in the case of our current President. In case you were wondering, the title of this post refers to Biden, not Santos.”
Noonan versus Menton on George Santos — I think Menton’s take is the one that belongs in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.