GOP Insanity Thread: a bunch of weirdos weirding out

[CaffeineNeeded]

Spy probably not… but assets of intelligence agencies are frequently hot fucking messes that get used.

[Jman220]

@m_reed05

I’m guessing he’s just a moron, sociopath, con man, who started grifting and because we live in the stupidest simulation it carried him to a Congressional seat.

I mean, it worked for Trump.

[goofy]

Santos!

https://twitter.com/kurteichenwald/status/1613969368697782272

Linked article is in Portuguese but the automated translation is

George Santos: depoimentos levantam suspeitas sobre brasileiro que inventou...

And every day more people appear saying they were deceived by George, not only in the USA, but also in Brazil . Like housewife Adriana Damasceno, who says that she met George at a bingo in Niterói, which he and his mother frequented. She also says that they became friends and that George now has access to her assets.

In 2011, they went to the United States together. According to Adriana, George used her name to go shopping, withdrew all the money she had in the bank and even pawned jewelry.

[goofy]

Santos!

Santos’s Lies Were Known to Some Well-Connected Republicans

In late 2021, as he prepared to make a second run for a suburban New York City House seat, George Santos gave permission for his campaign to commission a routine background study on him.
…
Some of Mr. Santos’s own vendors were so alarmed after seeing the study in late November 2021 that they urged him to drop out of the race, and warned that he could risk public humiliation by continuing. When Mr. Santos disputed key findings and vowed to continue running, members of the campaign team quit, according to three of the four people The New York Times spoke to with knowledge of the study.

The episode, which has not been previously reported, is the most explicit evidence to date that a small circle of well-connected Republican campaign professionals had indications far earlier than the public that Mr. Santos was spinning an elaborate web of deceits, and that the candidate himself had been warned about just how vulnerable those lies were to unraveling.

Fraudulent academic degrees. Involvement in a firm accused of a Ponzi scheme. Multiple evictions and a suspended driver’s license. All of it was in the report, which also said that Mr. Santos, who is openly gay, had been married to a woman. The report did not offer conclusive details, but some people briefed on the findings wondered whether the marriage was done for immigration purposes.

The existence of the vulnerability study underscores one of the most vexing questions still surrounding the strange saga of George Santos: How did the gate-keeping system of American politics — Republican leaders, adversarial Democrats and the prying media — allow a fabulist who boasted about phantom mansions and a fake résumé get away with his con for so long?
…
But Democrats struggled to do so. In 2020, the party incumbent, Tom Suozzi, dismissed Mr. Santos as a nonviable threat, and conducted no opposition research at all while cruising to victory. When Democrats did vet him two years later, they failed to find some of the most egregious fabrications that prompted members of Mr. Santos’s campaign team to quit.

[skydiver8]

How do you conduct NO oppo for a congressional race?

We paid a dude $10k and got a 40-page oppo book on our boring state senate candidate.

Absolute negligence on the part of every consultant and manager who worked on that campaign. I need to look up the name of the consultant firms they used so I will know to never ever hire them for anything…

[MrWookie]

At this point, are we even sure he’s a US citizen?

[Jman220]

Sounds like he got his citizenship possibly through a sham marriage.

[goofy]

I think he claims he was born here to Brazilian immigrant parents, but at this point anything he says about himself is more likely to be false than true

[otatop]

@skydiver8

How do you conduct NO oppo for a congressional race?

Supposedly the Dem incumbent did do the oppo research but then handed it off to local media hoping they’d out Santos on everything instead of just running with it themselves.

[riverman]

Amazing to somehow miss the memo that Sinclair and Gannett own 100% of local media now

[skydiver8]

Then it’s still a campaign team and PROBABLY a consultant issue, because that means they had no viable comms or digital strategy (both of which are usually outsourced).

[Jman220]

@riverman

Amazing to somehow miss the memo that Sinclair and Gannett own 100% of local media now

Nah, Long Island Newsday is one of the few local papers left that I think is not owned by either. Theyr’e usually not terrible either, it’s shocking that this was missed. I don’t buy that hte dems picked it up and did nothing with it.

[VoteForSocialists]

This surprises me as well, and i have read the opposite, that the democrat campaign knew of at least some of Santos’ background bullshit and tried to make it public, yet no reporter or voter seemed to care.

i guess most of what they knew was shit like “never graduated” or “goldman sachs wouldn’t confirm employment”. less of a criminal story than resume padding the voters assume just happens with people running for office.

[skydiver8]

Possibly. I can see the Brazilian stuff falling through a normal-level oppo search, but come on.

When it comes to comms, one of my big regrets from 2022 was not pushing our consultant harder on our comms strat (or lack thereof). Being told “no one will care” if you send out a press release is bullshit.

They might not care the first time you send it. Or even the second or third. But if you send out PRs every fucking day to every newsdesk, paper, podcast, outlet, influencer, etc that you can find, the story, especially one like that, WILL get out. If anything they’ll run it to just shut you up.

Trouble is, this strategy is NOT the standard for campaign comms, because like everything else in the campaign consultancy sphere, they are operating in a 2012 mindset… The standard is sending out a PR once in a while for big things, maybe writing an op-ed or two, and then just paying for ads.

[commonWealth]

I don’t know that you’ll annoy them into running it to shut you up, but it’ll be top of mind when they have a slow news day and need to fill airtime or column inches. And they can’t pull an old story to do that, so giving them fresh stuff all the time is the correct play. You should definitely push for that in any future campaigns, you’re right imo.

[riverman]

I truly can’t keep up.

WSJ News Exclusive | George Santos Raised Money for Company the SEC Says Was...

Mike Sington

[VoteForSocialists]

can we do an easy prop bet, who lasts longer?

santos as house member, or mccarthy as house speaker?

[otatop]

Wyoming wants to phase out sales of EVs by 2035 to "ensure the stability" of...

[Jman220]

Lol.

[goofy]

Guys, we finally know how to fix the budget situation:

Aaron Rupar

The wokeism budget, it’s huge, many people are saying we’re spending more money on wokeism than we are on heating our homes.