Why I Am A George Santos Birther

What should we ask of would be politicians?

John Stonehouse: The spy MP who faked his own death and ran away to Australia

Without further ado, here is my birth certificate.

I’m not a candidate for high office but I am, I suppose, a public figure so here it is. You didn’t ask of course but suppose you had. Here it is. There you have it.

I was among those who unwittingly participated in the Likud blackmail operation of Barack Obama by asking, what I thought was a rather innocent question: Who is Barack Obama’s father? The rather ridiculous notion that Barack Obama was born in Kenya was a little fanciful, a little too maddening.

Of course many of us maintain that Frank Marshall Davis is Obama’s real father — that’s certainly the contention of the Russians — and who knows really who is Bill Clinton’s dad is. How interesting, isn’t it that we don’t know the fathers of two of our presidents. There’s something very American about that, isn’t there? Something very constructed… You can even imagine dear old Ben Franklin, whose psyop autobiography has been promoting American virtues ever since it was constructed, nodding along. On some level to build your legend is to be an American. The line between lying and legend is a fine one and many have tested it with various degrees of success.

In our day and age, what information is too private to demand of our elected officials? To quote the great Tim Dillon, “Does anyone have to ask credentials anymore?” Apparently not.

We’ve seen rather often that a fake backstory is also known as a cover.

In an era of facial recognition the era of the in person federal informant may well be drawing to a close. It seems obvious that many federal informants are, in fact, spies of foreign powers.

Might those foreign powers place their assets in our congress? And how might we detect these people? And might the fibbing of an audacious and ambitious member of congress lead to real world recruitment?

Yes, Rep. Ana Paulina Luna and Andrew Ogles fictionalized large bits of their back story but that’s par for the course in politics. That they hail from districts that narrowly went for the Republicans in heavily gerrymandered states also no doubt put a target on their backs. (Note interestingly the failed efforts to install former State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus in Tennessee’s fifth congressional district.)

All of which brings me to Curious George Santos.

When news of the drag queen story month began I asked my friends hither and thither for the receipts on Mr. Santos’s birth. They were not forthcoming.

Could it be, I asked, that Mr. Santos was, in fact, an undocumented immigrant? Does an illegal alien walk the halls of Congress?

I have asked around for the following documents and I have come up empty. This is odd because I usually do not come up empty. Nor do my friends.

They are:

• His birth certificate or any identifying documents. Supposedly he was born in Queens. Let’s see it.

• Any naturalization docs for his parents or his sister.

• Anything on his first or second marriage.

Perhaps the Internet can help me. Perhaps you, dear reader, came help me.

I am prepared to offer a reward should such a thing be needed.

Now Charles. Why are you picking on Curious George? Aren’t all the congress critters to some extent frauds?

Fair enough, says I. I won’t dissuade you from that supposition.

After all, I agree with Milton Friedman — that politics isn’t about getting good men to do good things but about bad men to do good things.

John Stonehouse, Czech spy

The grooming of assets takes place over time as the stranger than fiction story of John Stonehouse makes all too clear. You might note that there’s been a spate of documentaries and even a TV series about Stonehouse.

Here’s The Guardian:

The true story of John Stonehouse’s entanglement with espionage and faked death was far more fascinating than the television drama airing this week, according to his great-nephew Julian Hayes.

Hayes, who has clear childhood memories of Stonehouse and the impact of his disappearance in 1974 on the family, said little of the dramatised version was strictly factual. A honeytrap executed by the Czech secret services has been substituted for the real-life “slow insidious grooming” of the Labour MP for Wednesbury and Walsall North, he said.

“If you’d written the Stonehouse story as fiction, it would be completely unbelievable. There’s no way on earth that anybody would swallow it as a plot line. It’s a classic case of truth being stranger than fiction.”

…

Stonehouse was a member of Harold Wilson’s cabinet as aviation minister and postmaster general, but his career crashed when he was named in 1969 as an agent of the Czech secret service. His problems were compounded by worsening financial troubles and an affair with his secretary, Sheila Buckley.

After stealing the identities of two deceased men in his constituency to create fake passports, Stonehouse flew to Miami, checked into the Fontainebleau hotel and went for a swim, leaving a pile of clothes on the beach. After he failed to return, he was presumed drowned, leaving a wife and three children.

Five weeks later, he was arrested in Australia, where he had been joined by his lover. Stonehouse was later sentenced at the Old Bailey to seven years in prison for fraud, theft and deception.

Hayes, whose biography of his great-uncle, Stonehouse: Cabinet Minister, Fraudster, Spy, was published in 2021, said the TV drama misrepresented how the politician became embroiled with the Czech secret services.

“The drama portrays a honeytrap, but in fact they psychologically groomed him over a period of time. There was no sex involved.

“A Czech agent befriended him and worked on him over lunches and dinners. If they’d said, ‘John, we’d like you to spy for us’, he’d have said no. But a slow insidious step-by-step persuasion to cooperate worked.

“He was not a spy in the sense of James Bond or the novels of John Le Carré. But he provided the Czechs with information and got a lot of money from them. He knew what he was doing.” [Emphasis added]

Does George Santos know what he is doing?

Consider all he knows about the Republican Jewish Coalition, the Zionist Organization of America, former acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell (of Wirecard fame), and Andrew Intrader’s ties to Russian intelligence and Viktor Vekselberg. Vekselberg’s properties are being seized by the feds lately but I bet you that he was an investor in Gawker and that it was a front for Russian intelligence, did you?

It would, in other words, be a shame to indict him. It would be far better to turn him.

Perhaps the best thing that Santos has going for him is his rolodex. Let’s not have it go to waste.