When I’m sharing examples of politician humor, I’m indirectly wading into a serious debate.
- Are bad people naturally drawn to the corruption of politics?
- Or, do good people get corrupted after getting into politics?
I don’t pretend to know the answer, though I suspect it’s a combination of both.
What I do know is that we always have lots of options when deciding who deserves to be named the “Politician of the Year.”
I already wrote last October about Eric Adams, the Mayor of New York City.
Today, we have two more options.
The New York Times has a fascinating look at how a freshman Republican apparently created a fictional life story during his successful campaign for Congress.
Here are some excerpts from the story, authored by Grace Ashford and Michael Gold.
By his account, he catapulted himself from a New York City public college to become a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats. But a New York Times review of public documents and court filings from the United States and Brazil, as well as various attempts to verify claims that Mr. Santos, 34, made on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the résumé that he sold to voters. Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Mr. Santos’s campaign biography, told The Times they had no record of his ever working there. Officials at Baruch College, which Mr. Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year. There was also little evidence that his animal rescue group, Friends of Pets United, was, as Mr. Santos claimed, a tax-exempt organization: The Internal Revenue Service could locate no record of a registered charity with that name.
Seems like Santos has a good head start on other newcomers to Congress. Does he deserve to be “Politician of the Year”?
Perhaps, but there’s another contestant to consider.
As reported by Thomas Catenacci of Fox News, the Secretary of Transportation is a big believer that global warming is a major problem.
But that does not stop him from using taxpayer-funded private jets to advance his political ambitions.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, an advocate of increased government action to curb carbon emissions, has taken at least 18 flights using taxpayer-funded private jets since taking office, Fox News Digital has learned. Buttigieg has traveled across the country — visiting Florida, Ohio and New Hampshire, among other states — and out of the country using a private jet fleet managed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), according to flight tracking data… APT executive director Caitlin Sutherland told Fox News Digital… “for someone so holier-than-thou on reducing emissions, Buttigieg sure doesn’t seem to mind the pollution caused by his literal jet-setting,” she continued. “This is hypocrisy at its finest, and these troubling expenses to taxpayers must come under immediate scrutiny.” …The states Buttigieg visited have largely been considered swing states in recent federal elections.
I have an entire page dedicated to “Honest Leftists,” but maybe I also need a page for “Hypocritical Leftists.” Buttigieg definitely qualifies.
Though the real scandal isn’t his use of private jets rather than commercial flights. It’s the fact that he’s the head of a department that shouldn’t even exist.
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Image credit: DonkeyHotey | CC BY 2.0.
