Sen. Larry Craig has been a busy man. In June he was arrested in a sex-sting operation in a men’s bathroom at the Minneapolis airport. In August he pleaded guilty to a disorderly conduct charge stemming from the arrest. On Saturday he announced that he wasn’t gay, but he was “deeply sorry” about his arrest and would quit the Senate.
By Wednesday the Idaho Republican had gone from humbled and humiliated to indignant. Now he might not leave the Senate after all.
The latest strange twist: Craig inadvertently left a voice message meant for his crisis-management team on someone else’s phone. Craig sees hope! “[Sen.] Arlen Specter is now willing to come out in my defense, arguing that it appears by all that he knows that I’ve been railroaded,” Craig said on the message. He said “it would help the story” if he is seen as fighting back.
His lawyers on Wednesday asked the Senate Ethics Committee to reject a complaint based on Craig’s guilty plea in the sex sting because the plea is “wholly unrelated” to his official duties. Craig sent word that he will resign only if he can’t get his guilty plea in Minnesota dismissed.
So Craig apparently no longer wishes to spare his fellow GOP an “unwanted and unfair distraction” in the Senate, as he put it on Saturday.
Most people don’t care whether Craig is gay. They do, though, care that he pleaded guilty to a charge connected to soliciting sex in a public bathroom. It seems clear from the police tapes that he was doing just that, despite his denials. The Idaho Statesman has reported on evidence of other public solicitations of sex by Craig, including at Union Station in Washington, D.C.
Larry Craig is deluding himself. Besides his failure to disclose his guilty plea, this is not a matter of political ethics. It is a matter of personal mores. He ought to get out of the Senate.
