Boy, the GOPs have hung this Craig fellah out to dry. It's like he's the bearer of the bubonic plague or something. Colleagues and friends of the senator are calling for the bouncers. I don't know which is worse...Craig's alleged (remember it's the word of a cop over his) homosexual solicitations in a public bathroom or the way his' colleagues and compadres are doing an about face on his sorry ass. Friends usually give you the benefit of the doubt, at least initially...not this bunch. Hasta la vista, baby:
"More Republicans distanced themselves from Craig on Thursday. Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, who chairs the GOP's senatorial campaign committee, stopped short of calling on him to resign but suggested strongly that he should.
"I wouldn't put myself hopefully in that kind of position, but if I was in a position like that, that's what I would do," Ensign told The Associated Press in his home state. "He's going to have to answer that for himself."
Sens. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, each turned over to charity $2,500 in campaign donations they had received from Craig's political action committee.
Coleman and several other Republicans - including presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. - have called for Craig to resign his seat in the Senate. Craig already has agreed to a request by Republican leaders to give up his ranking status on the Veterans Affairs Committee and Appropriations subcommittees.
http://news.aol.com/story/nc/_a/audio-tape-of-senators-arrest-released/20070827191209990001
The friends of Job can't hold a candle to Craig's purported friends. Mercy! Talk about swift-boating! Whiz! Mitt had this to say:
"Yeah, I think it reminds us of Mark Foley and Bill Clinton," Romney said on CNBC. "I think it reminds us of the fact that people who are elected to public office continue to disappoint, and they somehow think that if they vote the right way on issues of significance or they can speak a good game, that we'll just forgive and forget."
http://www.kptv.com/politics/13998517/detail.html
Really, Mr. Romney, what about Ted Stevens and David Vitters...you seem to have forgiven and forgotten them. Yet, one senator had this to say:
"We at least ought to hear his side of the story."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070830/ap_on_go_co/craig_arrest_83
Which senator said that? Christopher Dodd!
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Methinks they protesteth too much.
A Sting He Didn't Deserve
By Aaron Belkin
Saturday, September 1, 2007; Page A25
If Sen. Larry Craig is guilty of a serious crime, you'd never know it from listening to the audiotape of his arrest or from reading his arrest record.
Craig entered a Minneapolis airport restroom and fidgeted with his fingers while standing outside an occupied stall, occasionally peering through the crack between the door and the doorframe. After entering an adjacent stall, he sat, tapped his foot and touched the occupant's shoe with his own. Finally, Craig swiped his hand under the stall divider three times, at which point the occupant revealed his police credentials.
Craig later denied that he had done anything wrong and insisted that he is not now and never has been gay. Although homosexuality is not illegal, Craig thought that he could protect himself simply by claiming a heterosexual identity.
The arresting officer, however, believed that Craig wanted to have sex with him, and recognized the tapping of Craig's right foot "as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct." Craig was arrested after only six minutes.
Craig's case apparently was handled according to the book. But the use of everyday gestures that fall short of sex to mete out punishment for sexual misconduct illustrates a revealing departure from methods that investigators used to carry out sting operations nearly a century ago. Courts used to require a lot more than the tapping of a toe to sustain a conviction for a morals crime.
In 1919 the Navy hired "decoys" to frequent the lobby of the YMCA in Newport, R.I. Orchestrated by officers at the local Naval Training Station, the cleanup campaign sought to eliminate gay men from the ranks. Following an introduction, decoys would accompany their suspects to a hotel room and then have sex. At least three dozen sailors and civilians were arrested, and many ended up in jail.
According to conventions of the day, if men confined themselves to masculine behaviors and sex roles, they could engage in sex with other men without inviting accusations of being gay. Because perversion was seen primarily as a function of effeminate mannerisms and passive sexual tastes, government decoys could have sex with gay men with impunity as long as they assumed the active position during those encounters. Or so the Navy assumed.
When the 1919 sting operation ensnared a local minister, the Episcopal Church fought back, and what had been a local operation became a national scandal that almost ended the burgeoning political career of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was then assistant secretary of the Navy.
The church persuaded the Navy and the Senate to investigate the sting operation, and when it became apparent that the military had enlisted heterosexuals to engage in sex with other men, there was a public outcry.
Thus began the shift away from sting operations involving sex acts with government agents, and a recognition by military and other investigators that they would have to rely on evidence short of actual sexual conduct as the basis for convictions. Historian David Johnson has shown that under the Pervert Elimination Campaign in the late 1940s, U.S. Park Police agents in the District of Columbia charged hundreds of men in gay cruising areas with disorderly conduct, indecency and other crimes, even though many had done nothing explicit.
Craig joins the growing list of people who have been charged with morals crimes for innocuous behavior.
While it may be that people who behave as Craig did are looking for sex, there remains an important difference between seeking sex and having public sex. Society certainly has a right to uphold standards of public decorum, but increasing criminalization of harmless behavior opens up a space for injustice unevenly applied.
As a federal judge observed in the 1948 case of a D.C. man who had been arrested for lewd and immoral behavior after inviting an undercover police officer up to his apartment for a drink, "any citizen who answers a stranger's inquiry as to direction, or time, or a request for a dime or a match is liable to be threatened with an accusation of this sort."
One particularly egregious example of how the judge's fear has become a legal reality is the fact that, as Harvard professor Janet Halley has shown, the "don't ask, don't tell" policy allows military judges to treat hand-holding and other benign gestures as the legal equivalent of sex.
Sen. Craig, who voted to enact "don't ask, don't tell" in 1993, got caught up in a system that looks a lot like the one he helped create, a system in which innocent gestures can invite punishment. It is a trap that he and others should not have to fear.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/31/AR2007083101426.html?wpisrc=newsletter
September 30
Editorial Update from the Boston Globe:
Is Craig Really A Hypocrite?
By Jeff Jacoby
Globe Columnist
September 2, 2007
IDAHO isn't Massachusetts, so as soon as the story of his bathroom escapade broke it was clear that Senator Larry Craig would soon be needing new business cards. Except for those elected from the Bay State, US senators and representatives involved in sex scandals are almost always forced to leave Congress. Making advances to an undercover policeman while cruising an airport men's room more than qualifies as a sex scandal, so the senator's only real choice was to resign in disgrace or be thrown out by the voters.
And so Craig becomes the latest in a depressingly long and bipartisan line of ex-members of Congress done in by their libido - Wayne Hays, Wilbur Mills, Robert Bauman, Dan Crane, Brock Adams, Bob Packwood, and Mark Foley, to mention only a few. He won't be the last.
Craig's behavior was lewd and dishonorable, but - have you noticed? - that isn't the main reason he has been excoriated. In much journalistic and political commentary, the senator's real crime is not that he was trolling for anonymous, adulterous sex in a public bathroom, but that doing so supposedly proved him a hypocrite. "Savor the rank hypocrisy of Craig's personal and public behavior," writes Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason magazine, in the Los Angeles Times. "An arch-social conservative, Craig voted in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act . . . and he is a strong supporter of a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage."
Representative Barney Frank - a beneficiary of the above-mentioned Massachusetts exemption - compresses the indictment into a sentence: "The hypocrisy," he told the AP, "is to deny legal equality to gay people, but then to engage in gay behavior." The Idaho Statesman disclosed last week that it had undertaken an investigation into Craig's sex life after he was "outed" by a gay blogger in October. The blogger's goal, the paper said, was "to nail a hypocritical Republican foe of gay rights."
I find Craig's behavior odious, and I think it right that he was shamed into leaving office. What it isn't clear to me is that he was a hypocrite.
In the first place, opposing same-sex marriage doesn't make someone a "foe of gay rights" or of gay people; redefining marriage is a controversial political issue on which reasonable people disagree.
But even if you do characterize Craig's public record as one of hostility to gays and homosexual behavior, his behavior in the Minneapolis men's room wasn't hypocritical. It was squalid. It was degrading. Can anyone imagine that Craig was proud of what he was doing? Or that he was skulking around a public toilet trying to pick up strangers because he believed such behavior was unobjectionable? Surely the opposite was true - not that he approved of what he was doing, but that he disapproved, and hoped no one would find out.
A furtive surrender to temptation may indicate lust or stupidity or a failure of will, but it takes more than that to prove hypocrisy. The H-word gets thrown around with abandon these days, but generally what is meant by it is inconsistency - failing to live up to one's words, falling short of the values one espouses.
Thus a politician who calls for more compassion yet never gives a dime to charity is inconsistent, but not necessarily hypocritical. A gun-control advocate who shoots an intruder with an unregistered handgun can be faulted for not acting in keeping with his beliefs, but that alone doesn't make him a hypocrite. A woman strongly opposed to abortion who gets one herself when she becomes pregnant hasn't practiced what she preached. But that isn't hypocrisy - not unless she never meant what she preached in the first place.
Hypocrisy isn't merely saying one thing but sometimes doing another. Nor is it simply having a double standard - lionizing Anita Hill, say, but trashing Paula Jones (or vice versa). Hypocrisy is worse than that. It's a form of duplicity. A hypocrite is one who doesn't believe the moral views he proclaims and violates them routinely in his own life.
So who is a hypocrite? The antidrug zealot who cheerfully tokes up with his friends. The "family-values" politician who blasts the sins of others while blithely carrying on affairs of his own. The public champion of women's rights who privately treats women like dirt. The cleric who preaches chastity and abstinence, but is a serial pedophile behind closed doors.
Hypocrisy is deceit, not weakness; a vice, not a blind spot. Larry Craig has much to atone for. But the charge of hypocrisy seems to me a bum rap.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles
/2007/09/02/is_craig_really_a_hypocrite/
There have been some, but, none have been dispatched with such promptitude as Mr. Craig...and on a misdemeanor charge. He actually did nothing...he didn't touch anyone nor did he solicit sex, but, for some body language. Seriously, I've seen guys peeking into stalls plenty of time...they do it once or twice...than say something like, "Hey, buddy, hurry it up...don't hog the pot."
I must remember never...ever...to tap my foot while in a public toilet.
Craig Finds An Ally In Specter
Pa. senator says colleague should withdraw plea, fight conviction
By Erika Bolstad McClatchy Newspapers
Article Last Updated: 09/03/2007 12:18:16 AM MDT
Washington - A day after Idaho Sen. Larry Craig announced he would step down because he had "little control over what people choose to believe" about his personal life, he finally found an ally among fellow Republicans in Washington.
Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, offering a contrarian voice to the calls by Senate GOP leaders for Craig to resign, said he would have liked to see Craig keep fighting for his seat.
Although Craig pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct last month after a sex sting in a men's room in the Minneapolis airport, the evidence was flimsy, Specter told "Fox News Sunday."
"I'd still like to see Sen. Craig fight this case," Specter said. "He left himself some daylight, when he said he 'intends' to resign in 30 days. I'd like to see Larry Craig go back to court, seek to withdraw his guilty plea and fight the case. I've had some experience in these kinds of matters since my days as Philadelphia district attorney, and with the evidence, Sen. Craig wouldn't be convicted of anything."
Specter, however, was in the minority Sunday.
http://www.denverpost.com/ci_6788107?source=rss
Oh sweet naive Vickey, I know you just hatched out of the red white and blue eggshell, but you need to do some history research.
See there was this guy named Foley, he liked to play slap and tickle with the page boys, even those who didn't like it.
His party members knew but stayed silent because they could always blackmail Foley to vote the way they wanted. And that dear Vickey is not "sweeping it under the rugs" that is sheer exploitation.
Funny, however that you should make rugs plural, in the old phrase. What? It takes a lot of rugs in a Repub administration??
This went on for YEARS.
"The real motive behind secret sting operations like the one that resulted in Sen. Craig's arrest is not to stop people from inappropriate activity. It is to make as many arrests as possible -- arrests that sometimes unconstitutionally trap innocent people," Romero said in a written statement."
The article, in CNN, reads in part:
"Conservative Sen. Larry Craig got support from an unexpected source on Monday. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a brief in court saying the lawmaker's bathroom bust was likely unconstitutional.
The ACLU urged a Minnesota District Court to let Craig withdraw his guilty plea.
...The ACLU friend-of-the-court brief was submitted to the Minnesota 4th District Court.
...Police must be able to demonstrate beyond a doubt that the sex was going to happen in public, he said. Regardless of whether it occurs in a bathroom or a bar, solicitation for private sex is protected speech under the First Amendment, the ACLU argues.
If the police really wanted to stop people from having sex in public bathrooms, they "should put up a sign banning sex in the restroom and send in a uniformed officer to patrol periodically," Romero said.
..."Government should make public restrooms safe for all, but it should do so in a manner that is really designed to stop inappropriate behavior, rather than destroying the lives of people who might have no intention of doing anything illegal," Romero said.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/09/17/aclu.craig/index.html
Craig: 'I Will Continue My Work'
EDINA, Minn. -- Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) just made it official that he will remain in the Senate, presumably until Judge Charles A. Porter issues a ruling here on the Idaho Republican's effort to withdraw his guilty plea to disorderly conduct in an airport men's restroom.
Here's Craig's statement from his Senate Web site.
This is somewhat expected since Porter concluded the roughly 45-minute hearing by saying he would not be able to issue a ruling until "the end of next week" at the earliest. Craig had originally set Sept. 30 as his resignation date if the matter was not resolved, but is apparently willing to wait an additional week or more to get complete legal clarity on the issue.
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/capitol-briefing/2007/09/martin_on_craigs_judge_very_en.html
GOP Wants Craig to Go
Sunday, October 7, 2007 2:45 PM
By: Ronald Kessler
Sen. Larry Craig's decision to remain in the Senate has outraged Republican senators, who hope to force out the disgraced senator.
When Craig spoke with Republican colleagues after announcing his decision, only two of the 45 senators present applauded his defense of his conduct in a men's room at the Minneapolis airport, according to one source.
"Members are making it known publicly and privately that they think he should resign," said an aide to a key Republican member. "He is being treated as a pariah. When senators see him, they walk in the other direction. He is bringing down the party and providing Democrats with an issue. He is embarrassing the whole Senate by remaining. It is an act of pure selfishness."
Craig, 62, was arrested June 11 in a men's room in the Minneapolis airport by an undercover officer. The officer said Craig exhibited behavior consistent with seeking a sexual encounter. On Aug. 1, he pleaded guilty by mail to disorderly conduct.
The Idaho senator first said he intended to resign on Sept. 30. After some prodding from Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, Craig then said he would remain in the Senate as his legal case continued.
Last week, Hennepin County Judge Charles Porter ruled: "Because the defendant's plea was accurate, voluntary and intelligent, and because the conviction is supported by the evidence ... the defendant's motion to withdraw his guilty plea is denied."
Craig then changed course again, saying he does not plan to leave office until his term expires in January 2009.
"I am innocent of the charges against me," he said in a statement.
"Senator Craig gave us his word" that he would resign by Sept. 30 if he could not overturn the guilty plea, said Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., who chairs the GOP campaign committee overseeing next year's Senate elections. "I wish he would stick to his word."
"It's embarrassing for the Senate; it's embarrassing for his party," Ensign said.
Asked for his opinion, Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., said, "You don't want to know what I really feel." DeMint is chairman of the Senate Steering Committee, a caucus that includes the majority of the Republican Conference, the organization of all Republican senators.
Shunned though he is, Craig has a few defenders, including Republican Sens. Michael D. Crapo, also of Idaho, and Specter. Both said Craig was within his rights to remain and try to clear his name.
"Senator Craig is entitled to make his decision and I respect it," Specter said. "Disorderly conduct is not moral turpitude, and it is no basis for leaving the Senate."
While the U.S. Constitution provides that two-thirds of the members of the House or Senate may expel one of its members, since 1789 the Senate has expelled only 15 members, all but one for supporting the Confederacy. Yet, said Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., "Clearly, his ability to serve his people was severely compromised."
The bipartisan Senate ethics panel is gearing up for possible hearings into Craig's case, a step requested by Republican leaders when they were trying to persuade the senator to step down. Some senators hope that the prospect of tough hearings will lead him to resign. But Craig is said to be oblivious to warnings or advice from friends and advisors.
If the hearings are public and air still more seamy details, it will mark another setback for the GOP.
http://www.newsmax.com/kessler/craig_resign_specter
_GOP/2007/10/07/38880.html