This Just In?

      Did you hear?  Netflix is working on a George Santos biopic, to be called Forging A Career!

      That's a joke.  Unfortunately, the Long Island politician's seemingly unending series of lies describing his education, family, career, employees and personal life is not.  Also not a joke: that his political opponent apparently assumed there was no need to do any oppo research, that only one small, local paper reported on the questionable nature of the then-candidate's self-reported history and that exactly zero of the big news organizations, from the New York Time to Fox News, caught the story at the time.  Now it's too late and the state of New York is about to ship a particularly bare-faced liar off to the U. S. House of Representatives.  He may be hounded out of office by public pressure, but if he digs in, there's little the nearly evenly-divided House can do officially.

      Elsewhere, Fox News opinionator Sean Hannity has incurred wrath by admitting when questioned under oath about voting-machine fraud costing then-President Trump's re-election, "I did not believe it for one second."  Oops!  That's not what he was saying at the time.

      One lesson here is that when politicians and news commentators tell you their peers are cynical, serial liars, they're probably describing the ones they know best: themselves.  There's a little deception in all of it; pols and talking heads go out there day after day, night after night, happy, sad or so tired they can barely focus, and they hit their marks and say their piece no matter what -- and that's kind of a lie.  Public figures burnish their resumes a little bit and we wink at it; J. Random Senator says he spent a college summer doing charity work when instead he was sweeping floors at the Y for beer money or hanging out in the Hamptons, tipping lavishly.  But the way over the top stuff, well, they're not supposed to do it.  If they're going to cast stones, they'd better be up there with Caesar's wife in the penthouse above reproach, not living in a glass house, or it will all come crashing down.

      Me, I'd be happy to see more lies falter and fail, and in coming weeks, they just might.  We'll never have perfectly honest politicians (we'd probably loathe them if we did, even more than we do now), and news commentators will forever fall to the temptation of saying what's popular or attention-getting instead of hewing strictly to the true and the real; but the most egregious lies need to be found out and their tellers hauled into the light and laughed at, no matter whose interests they serve.