How have our politicians gotten so bad at lying?

It’s been a bumpy month or so for newly elected Congressman George Santos, if that is his real name. Shortly after his upset win in November that flipped a key New York district from blue to red, reports began to surface showing he had told a few wee lies to voters on his way to Capitol Hill. He had not attended the prestigious college he said he had, he hadn’t worked at the big Wall Street firm, and, in the most humorous example, he had to admit he wasn’t Jewish but rather “Jew-ish.”

Politicians have always been known to have a tenuous relationship with the literal truth, but they used to be creative, even talented at it. Today they resemble a toddler claiming he did not steal the cookie from the jar as he’s chewing it. This decline in the overall quality of political prevarication and duplicity is surely a result of the fact that we barely punish such things anymore.

There was a time when the Santos revelations would have ended a political career. It was only 1987 when Douglas Ginsburg, who was about to be nominated by Ronald Reagan to the Supreme Court, had his name pulled when NPR sleuthed out that he had smoked grass while in college and as a professor in the 1970s (the horror!). Gary Hart lost his bid for the White House on the basis of a frisky photo on a boat called Monkey Business. How tame that all seems today.

On the whole, it’s a good thing that we no longer mete out the political death penalty for minor offenses. Elizabeth Warren is still allowed to be a terrible senator and worse presidential candidate even though she falsely claimed to be a marginalized American Indian for most of her career. New York state senator Julia Salazar, a darling of the Democratic Socialists, got into hot matzoh ball soup for falsely claiming to be Jewish — which is a weird one because people actually can convert to Judaism if they want to.

Then there’s the president. He’s on a level all his own. Joe Biden isn’t capable of accurately relating events that took place anytime prior to last Tuesday. Throughout his career, he has crafted whoppers about his academic prowess, his battles with Corn Pop, his days driving the big rigs and conversations with long dead uncles over unwanted military medals. And he claims that none of this is a joke, man.

Santos’s first reported lies were actually fairly tame. He went to NYU? Worked at Goldman Sachs? Was he running for Congress or chatting up the bottle service girl at Soho House? As for being Jew-ish, it’s more complicated than it seems. I myself, though a proud practicing Catholic, am half-Jewish on my father’s side. We don’t actually have a good term for people with Jewish ancestry who do not practice the faith. We struggle with the notion that being Jewish is both a religion and a race. I don’t keep Shabbat but I am very proud of the corned beef at Katz’s.

Now there are allegations of campaign finance law violations — and if true, that is clearly another and more serious matter, one that really could derail his congressional career. But résumé enhancement? Meh.

Part of the issue with these small lies is that they are so easy to suss out. In The Music Man, librarian Marion has to do real research in books to discover Professor Hill is lying about having graduated from the Gary Conservatory of Music, class of aught five. Today, she would have known after a ten-second search on her phone, and young Ron Howard would never have gotten a trumpet.

Throughout the grueling drama that was the fight over Kevin McCarthy’s speakership, Santos actually offered a bit of comic relief. Memes abounded with images of him on the House floor, most mocking him with extraordinary claims of having landed on the Moon or some such thing. It was, in the end, harmless fun, and so too his résumé lies are essentially harmless.

If the deeper and more sinister charges against Santos do not bear fruit, he deserves a chance to serve his constituents, even if they thought they were voting for someone more credentialed. After all, in two years, they can kick him to the curb if they so choose. But in the meantime, McCarthy and GOP leadership will let him prove himself to the voters, if he can. And that is as it should be.

Shakespeare put it thus: “Therefore I lie with her and she with me, And in our faults by lies we flatter’d be.” Everyone has lied now and then. Everyone has asked for second chances. Is it too much to ask though, that our leaders lie a bit less blatantly, with more guile and aplomb? Americans can handle being lied to by politicians, but please: do it better, because we don’t care to be treated like fools.