30 December—You’ve got to hand it to George Santos, the young Republican con man who piled lie upon lie upon lie to get himself elected to the 118^th Congress, representing New York State’s Third District on Long Island’s North Shore and a little of Queens. (If you didn’t know, Queens and Brooklyn, while boroughs of the City of New York, are in fact on Long Island.)

It worked. The mendacious twerp will likely officially take his place in the nation’s biggest whorehouse on 3 January to join other serial liars—most of the elected representatives—in screwing the very people who have put them in their privileged positions.

Sure, Santos embellished (as he put it with self-serving euphemism) his résumé heroically (as I put it with reluctantly admiring euphemism). He may not even be homosexual. Oh the horror!

George insists he’s “not a fraud, . . . not a criminal who defrauded the entire country and made up [a] fictional character and ran for Congress.” Well, he may not be a criminal in the specific matter of his biographical novel but he certainly did defraud at least the people who voted for him; and the person they elected to congress certainly was a fictional candidate.

George assures all who give a damn that he will not be deterred “from having good legislative success.” (As opposed to bad legislative success, presumably.) “I will be effective,” he pledges, “I will be good. I intend to deliver on the promises I made during the campaign.”

Take that for what it’s worth. And count your fingers, toes, and money. If the voters in the Third Congressional had taken doubts published in a local weekly seriously, they probably wouldn’t have elected George Santos. But they got what they deserved. Voters usually do. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.

Keep in mind, too, that George Santos—a rather brilliant Trump-in-training con man—is a politician. Politicians lie to get elected, politicians lie to stay elected. And any politicians who tell you otherwise are lying. (How do you know politicians are lying? They’re telling you they’re not lying. And the House Ethics Committee is nothing but an oxymoron.)

Okay, that may be a bit too negative about the people we’ve got to trust because they’re the least bad we can find. So, put more charitably, politicians often bend the truth and misstate facts—always to their own advantage, of course. Why else?

George Santos was able to pull it off his big steal with panache. With apologies to Dylan Thomas, then, don’t be surprised if he does not go gentle into that good political night.

And consider this: If George Santos were a Democrat con man who had just got elected to Congress, would The New York Times have exposed him as a fraud?