It takes a fraud to know one. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and George Santos, in an official GOP Campaign Photo, when Stefanik, House GOP Conference Chair, was boosting Santos as part of “The Next Generation of Republican Leadership.”

Over the past year, I’ve written a few pieces about Georgie Santos, the former Drag Queen of a thousand lavish costume changes and faces, as he and his fellow blowhards like Steve Bannon, Elise Stefanik, Lee Zeldin and Kevin McCarthy inflated Santos, like a Diva Diribigle, onto the New York and National Political scenes.

Then, like the Hindenburg blimp bursting into flames over Lakehurst, New Jersey, the imposter immolated himself as he lied and lied as fast as he could flap his arms and his gums. First came a swath of indictments for breaking a number of federal laws, then his arrests. Now, Elise Stefanik’s favorite dragged queen—who cast a crucial vote to make Kevin McCarthy (briefly) Speaker of the House, is being kicked out of the Congress he faked his way into.

Sadly, it was only when House Ethics investigators discovered that Santos illegally used campaign funds for Botox, Spa Treatments, lavish hotel visits, fancy meals and expensive clothing—all such stereotypically Drag Queenie stuff—that they decided he was too much of a fraud, even for House Republicans—who have masqueraded as lawmakers, ever since they tried to burn the U.S. government down on January 6, 2021.

So before you have to listen to the bloviation over “fraud,” and “trust,” being bleated by the GOP-smacked ghouls in Congress next week, when they finally kick Santos in the pantos—to prevent the flames licking at his daring disguises from leaping onto THEM (I’m talking to YOU, ELISE!), remember who sold us Georgie Porgy as part of the “Next Generation of Republican Leadership.” (See Official GOP Campaign Photo).

(Back in December, 2022, I wrote about the blizzard of Trump-like lies swirling around newly-elected Republican Congressman George Santos, who fraudulently stole the New York Congressional seat in the district where I lived for 20 years. Santos was the poster-boy for the “Next Generation of Republican Leadership,” and campaigned with House Republican Conference Chair, Rep. Elise Stefanik, from upstate New York. Stefanik even helped raise money for Santos, and used some of those funds to support other GOP Congressional candidates, giving the GOP control of the House of Representatives.

This morning those lies, fraud and alleged crimes caught up with George Santos when he was arrested by the FBI, and indicted on 13-federal charges including money laundering, fraud, and theft of public money — COVID money.

Like many law abiding Americans, I love the sound of GOP frauds, liars and cheats being handcuffed in the morning…

Here’s my original piece, entitled “Georgy Santos Has No Pantos.”

He never went to Horace Mann,

He lies and lies as fast as he can.

Baruch, a goof; Citibank, a prank.

Georgy Santos has no pantos.

Deaths in the Holocaust? 9/11? Or Pulse?

Surely such horror was meant to repulse.

No one will fact check; no one will question.

To grift on such grief,

Is to cause indigestion.

Georgy Santos, has no pantos.

Ukrainian-ISH, Jew-ISH, or just a tad gay;

The lying was pure TrumpISH,

Even Elise would say.

To them, one big con game, so ripe to play.

An overnight wonder, like Elizabeth Holmes or Crypto;

Santos source of $$$, didn’t come from calypso.

From Brazilian fascists? Putin? Stefanik, perhaps?

Just cook up a fake resume, and goddamn the facts.

A dash of Latino, a gay man, a Jew —

A rich man, a poor man, anything for you.

A Grand Ole’ Prevaricator (that’s the G.O.P),

Santos is whatever you can imagine him to be.

If you can believe him,

Santos crashed the Insurrection,

So maybe Steve Bannon (friend of Lee Zeldin’s)

Funded his political resurrection.

Now, he’s exposed,

Like Mar-A-Lago’s Emperor, with no clothes.

Georgy Porgy with no pantos?

The only thing more cringy,

Is a Naked Ron DeSantos…

(Illustration by Art Spiegelman, Maus.)

In the frontispiece to Volume II of Art Spiegelman’s  Pulitizer Prize winning graphic novel, Maus, there is a quote from a 1930’s newspaper article from Pomerania, Germany:

“Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed…Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal…Away with the Jewish brutalization of the people!  Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!”

A contributing editor and artist for The New Yorker, Spiegelman’s drawings and prints have been exhibited in museums around the world. 

In frame after frame of his nearly 300-page monumental masterpiece Maus, Spiegelman carefully shows how years of calculated dehumanization of referring to Jews as “Vermin”, led to the massacre of millions of Jews, the disabled, members of the LGBTQ community, the press, liberals and humanists—whom Hitler wrote about extensively in “Mein Kampf”—as  just an extension of world Jewry.

Spielgelman, who still lives in NYC with his family, speaks even more graphically when discussing how methodically Nazi propagandists carried out their decades long campaign of dehumanization as a predicate to mass extermination:

“ The most shockingly relevant anti-Semitic work I found was “ The Eternal Jew,” a 1940 German “documentary” that portrayed Jews in a ghetto swarming in tight quarters, bearded caftaned creatures, and then a cut to Jews as mice—or rather rats—swarming in a sewer, with a title card that said “Jews are the rats” or the “vermin of mankind.” This made it clear to me that this dehumanization was at the very heart of the killing project. In fact, Zyklon B, the gas used in Auschwitz and elsewhere as the killing agent, was a pesticide manufactured to kill vermin—like fleas and roaches.”

With his flimsy, toupe-like veil of not mentioning us Jews specifically in his definition of  “Vermin”—delivered in a New Hampshire Veterans Day speech supposedly honoring thousands of American Veterans who sacrificed their lives fighting Hitler, and Fascism—Trump targeted many groups long tagged by tyrants like Hitler, Mussolini and Joseph McCarthy as “fellow travelers” of Jews:  “radical leftists,” “sinister, dangerous forces from within,” “communists,” “Marxists” and, “thugs.”

Mein Kampf, Hitler’s deranged diatribe against the Jews and “liberal” society,  written nearly 100 years ago from his cell in Landsberg Prison, explodes with the same kind of vitriol that Trump and his MAGA-Nazis use against many of their imagined contemporary enemies.  Sounding much like Trump, Hitler rants:

“…all at once the Jew also becomes liberal and begins to rave about the progress of mankind…Slowly, he makes himself the spokesman for a new era…To strengthen his political position he tries to tear down the racial and civil barriers…To this end, he fights with all the tenacity innate to the Jew, for religious tolerance; …another weapon in service to the Jews is the Press; the Jew talks of ‘enlightenment,’ ‘progress’, ‘freedom,’ ‘humanity’…and of the equality of all men without regard to race  and color.  He (The Jew) poisons the blood of others, but preserves his own.” (From, section of Mein Kampf entitled “Development of Jewry”)

Michael Tomasky, writing in The New Republic on November 12, 2023, is right to point out the difference in Trump’s Veterans Day version of “Mein Kampf,” :

“Trump, let us clarify, does not mention the Jews.  He means SOME Jews—the ones who aren’t for him, which, come to think of it, is most (American) Jews.”

American Jews, considerably to the left of our Israeli counterparts, have repeatedly rejected Trump, seeing right through his previously coded discriminatory, racist and totalitarian comments and tactics.  In 2016, Hillary Clinton won 71% of the Jewish vote, while receiving only 37 % of the overall white vote; Biden did even better among American Jewish voters in 2020, receiving 77% of the Jewish vote.  Polls taken earlier this summer positing a Biden/Trump match-up for 2024, show Biden with a massive 50 point lead among Jewish voters.  And that was before the Israel/Hamas war, in which Biden’s strong response has pushed his numbers among Jews even higher.

Perhaps most telling—and I’m sure Trump’s own Joseph Goebbels, Stephen Miller,  has read this—at the end of Hitler’s maniacal Mein Kampf section entitled “Development of Jewry,” Hitler reveals what we Jews are really after:

“His ultimate goal in this stage is the rule of ‘democracy,” or as he understands it: the rule of parliamentarianism.”

Among us Jews and our fellow travelers, we understand it as the “Rule of Law.”