To paraphrase Hamlet, ‘Alas poor Georgie we knew you well, more well than we wished.’ Yes folks, like Herpes (not) good ole George Santos is a forever thing. While medications can control the frequency and severity of outbreaks they WILL sometimes happen. So it is with former Congress Critter ‘Jack(Off) Of All Trades’ George Santos. He’s back whether we like or not but there could wind up being some good news. I’ll get to that. For the moment I should note the reason Santos is in the news again is that he appeared in federal court in Islip out on Long Island for a status hearing regarding his upcoming September trial. I actually feel bad for Islip for reasons I’ll explain in a minute.
A person with at least a little common sense and possessing any self-respect at all would have, having been caught cut himself a deal. Pled guilty to reduced charges in exchange for a light sentence and even with a recommendation at a minimum security facility. One of those “Club Fed” places. Santos? No way. He’s made of different stuff. Perhaps even things not found on the Periodic Table of Elements. No, Santos intends to fight this out at trial. Had he just pled out he’d be well into and perhaps even nearing the end of his sentence. But nooooooo! He’s chosen a path that will lead to him spending considerably more time in prison than he would have. I mentioned some good news and that’s it. Sometime this fall he’ll be convicted, and quite likely remanded to federal custody. If we’re lucky and the judge throws the book at him it might be several years before we see him in the news again. We can hope.
For now, as this brief article from CBS New York notes Santos was in court for a pre-trial hearing. It’s a short read but the only detail that mattered to me is that his trial will almost certainly begin as scheduled next month. (I mentioned in an earlier article on Politizoom down ballot Democrats might use Santos being in the news to advantage) Again the sordid details of Santos life and short Congressional career will be trotted out. Republicans will want to make a big freaking deal over having expelled him.
Ok, so they did THAT but you know what they didn’t do? Revoke his House privileges. Yep, we got “treated” to the sight of him at the SOTU after his expulsion because his fellow Republicans couldn’t be bothered with making sure he was not just gone but gone forever from showing up in their midst! Not that I (or you) needed a reminder of how much GOPers will protect even the worst of their own. Contrast that to Democrats when it came to Senator Menendez, with his fellow Democrats calling for him to resign. Ok, HE should have been expelled too except I’m not sure the votes were there. With people like Manchin and Sinema, and Republicans wanting to hang Menendez around OUR necks he might have survived such a vote.
Anyway, moving back to Santos when I first learned way back he’d be tried in Islip I thought what could be more fitting? Ok, that’s a tad mean-spirited. It’s probably a nice place and I shouldn’t dump on it (pun intended) but anyone fifty years old or older recalls the saga of the infamous “Garbage Barge.” Hell, it was an International story, in part because its voyage, the search for a place to dump the load of literal garbage it held was literally international. At some point the only thing that could have made the saga more of a joke was for someone (perhaps even Gordon Lightfoot himself) to do a parody version of the epic song about the Edmund Fitzgerald.
You can read the whole story on Wikipedia but the bottom line is this: Islip’s landfill was full and they’d built up a HUGE load of garbage they needed to get rid of. They decided to instead of finding some landfill elsewhere in New York state or buying up land for a new landfill of their own decided to it off to become someone else’s problem. Out of state. Word got out and people in other states (and countries) took exception to being dumping grounds for Long Islander’s trash. The whole thing started as a “How dare they?” scandal and morphed into a giant joke. Not just from late night comedians either.
Islip became a laughing stock. This all went down in 1987, years before the World Wide Web had been built out into what we know as the internet. Had the internet existed back then this would have THE viral story of viral stories. It’s status would be having an annual award for the biggest viral story of the year named for Islip’s famous Garbage Barge. I’ll bet residents of Islip, at least older ones give thanks whenever some new thing goes viral that there was no internet in 1987!
Now? Their community is once again going to be in the news because of giant load of political garbage in the form of one George Santos. It might not in and of itself go viral on a state or national scale but one or two local stories or social media posts in/from Islip referring to Santos as “Garbage Barge 2.0” will be the talk of the town. I’m sure I won’t be the only person who makes the connection between that infamous Garbage Barge, Santos and Islip and creates a meme like the one I hastily made for the title pic.
Jury members won’t have to have been in their mid to late teens to be thinking they want Santos, his sordid tale and the name of their town OUT of the news as quickly as possible. I’m betting the only question they’ll have after an immediate vote to convict is how long they should wait before informing the court they’ve reached their verdict. They’ll want to make it seem like there was at least some ‘deliberation.’
As for the rest of us, we can choose to view Santos trial as entertainment at his and the GOP’s expense or get pissy about him being in the news again. I’m choosing the former. I suggest you do too. If we HAVE to put up with Santos being in the news again we might as well have some fun with it. Tying it to the GOP in general will drive Trump nuts on a whole new topic. A bonus if you will. So I say come up with and take any cheap shot you want.
I think you have it backwards. The internet came first, with a non-graphical, text only interface. After a few years, a graphical interface was added, superimposed upon the existing internet, whereupn it became known as the World Wide Web.
My father was one of the first government scientists making use of the internet. I started using it in 1997 as it was evolving into the World Wide Web.
The origins of the internet are older than most people realize. By 1960 there were perhaps 10k computers in the world. The were mostly large, bulky machines that took up entire rooms. They were by today’s standards as slow as a child’s tricycle and had no way to communicate with each other. That’s when a couple of brilliant engineers proposed developing a way for a few select computers that REALLY needed to be able to “talk” between themselves was proposed. The idea was to create the means for the computers at Cheyenne Mountain (where our nukes are run out of), the Pentagon and the WH. It took a lot of work but various protocols were developed once the Advance Research Projects Agency was tasked with getting something done. (We now know it as DARPA – the D is for Defense) Over time a small network was developed for components of the DOD to communicate. Some saw the potential for something much larger, including some in Congress. A young Senator named Al Gore was one of those pushing for more funding.
By the early 1990s much of the details for the World Wide Web had been worked out, and it gained enough success that private investment joined in and the internet as we know it bloomed. But it all started over a half century ago as a way to have a select few computers be able to instantly share “packets” of information back and forth. From there it became an internal DOD communications network but still limited. You know the rest.
Many thanks for the history lesson. I accessed a corporate (private) data network at work in the 80s, and at a different company during the early 90s our entire office was connected to the world-wide web, but didn’t concern myself with its development.
Nevertheless your article is entertaining, and I will certainly enjoy the news coming out of Islip as their irate citizens skewer him.
That trial may not be the slam-dunk we envision.
Do you remember the video of a flag-festooned pickup truck with the image of Joe Biden bound, gagged and imprisoned on its tailgate? Yup, it’s owner is a Town of Islip resident. We were on our way to to our son”s house in Bay Shore when that monstrosity passed us on the parkway, where that type of vehicle are prohibited by the State’s Vehicle and Traffic Law. A good part of Long Island’s south shore and east end is MAGA country, and there have been several incidents of MAGAts displaying their usual lack of civility over recent years in the adjacent Town of Oyster Bay.
He’ll always be a republican.
Grasping, greedy, self-centered, narcissistic, thin-skinned, vulgar, hypocritical, corrupt and corrupting, lying, judgemental, and pompous.
You can take the man out of the party, but not the party out of the man, and everyone knows it.
They’re all tarred with the same brush.
That is the most excellent, thorough but succinct summation of Santos and the Republican party at large I remember seeing. Good on you!