Good morning.
Alberto Gonzales may be thanking his stars for Larry Craig just now, but it’s passing hard to imagine what other Republican is (by the look of them, certainly neither Mr. nor Mrs. Larry Craig). Larry’s excruciating performance on camera yesterday probably gave even some of us bystanders flopsweats, and then there was forlorn Suzanne — as Dana Milbank described her, wearing sunglasses and looking as if she felt ill. Yes, Larry owned, he’d gotten himself arrested in a men’s room at Minneapolis airport and had pled guilty to disorderly conduct, BUT
“Let me be clear: I am not gay. I never have been gay,” Craig said. Evidently, Craig did not think this was clear enough, because moments later, he explained why he kept the arrest a secret. “I wasn’t eager to share this failure, but I should have anyway — because I am not gay!”
The Associated Press rushed out a bulletin: “Sen. Larry Craig says, ‘I am not gay.’ ” CNN put up a “Breaking News” banner announcing, “Sen. Craig: I am not gay, and never have been gay.”
The Drudge Report went with the headline “Brokeback Bathroom.”
As recorded by WaPo’s Paul Kane, none of this is Larry’s fault in the least:
Craig said yesterday that he agreed to plead guilty because of the pressure he felt from the newspaper’s investigation. “I overreacted in Minneapolis, because of the stress of the Idaho Statesman‘s investigation and the rumors it has fueled around Idaho,” Craig said in his statement. He took no questions from reporters.
The paper reported on rumors — fueled by a gay activist’s report last fall that was based on anonymous sources — that Craig had engaged in restroom sexual encounters with other men, including an unnamed man the Statesman quoted in its report as saying he had sex with Craig in a restroom at Washington’s Union Station. In an interview with the newspaper in May, which was published yesterday, Craig denied having had gay sexual encounters and specifically denied restroom encounters.
“I’m going to have to leave it up to other people to weigh the care we took. I’m a bit disappointed” with Craig’s complaints, said Vicki Gowler, the paper’s top editor. “We were quite responsible, and we took great care with the story.”
Ruing the guilty plea he’d neglected to mention even to Suzanne, Larry also announced that now he’s retained legal counsel. To what end, though? Notes Kane:
In his guilty plea, according to court records, Craig acknowledged engaging in physical “conduct which I knew or should have known tended to arouse alarm or resentment of others.” Criminal defense lawyers said it could be difficult for Craig to have the case reopened.
Successful motions to withdraw guilty pleas usually meet a high threshold, such as showing that the person was misled into entering the plea, that his constitutional rights were violated or that there was wrongdoing by prosecutors, said Minneapolis lawyer Peter B. Wold.
But Craig’s written plea detailed the charges related to the airport incident and specified that he knew that the judge could not accept a guilty plea from a person who felt he was innocent, and that he was making no claim of innocence.
Now grant you, I’m real rusty, but I don’t see slam-dunk-lawyering room around that plea agreement in either the original arrest report or the new records uncovered by the Statesman. These latter show that “Craig revisited the Minneapolis airport 11 days later to complain about how he had been treated by police. He said he wanted information so his lawyer could speak to someone, according to a police report.” Josh Marshall:
You get the sense there’s a bit more to the narrative we haven’t heard yet. And what lawyer would that be? Presumably this was just a imaginary ‘lawyer’ Craig was referring to get contact info for the prosecutor. But maybe not. I’ve always found it a little iffy that Craig really consulted no lawyer about this since he had two months to mull it over.
Iffy to be sure, but hardly an impossibility for a thought pattern reeling inside a smashed psyche. Anyhow and meanwhile-back-at-the-presser, Milbank reports, “As the Craigs departed, somebody in the crowd that had gathered called out after the senator: ‘Hey, what if you were gay?’”
No answer to that, just a scuttling-away to challenge Gonzo’s for the land-speed record. Of course this poor homophobic moke is gay, and TPM reader TB yesterday filled in the “what if” (I quote him this extensively because there’s so much to learn):
… First, male-male sex in public bathrooms has been going on in America for at least 100 years…probably since the invention of the public bathroom. Our culture’s lack of understanding of sexuality, and our gender-segregated bathrooms, created an environment where males naturally happen upon each other in stages of undress (much like the locker room). Such scandalous behavior has been uncovered at YMCAs (originally built as boarding houses for World War I soldiers), park restrooms, and transit station restrooms since the early 20th century. Typically, men who had sex with each other in these restrooms were caught by plainclothes investigators who pretended to accept their suitors’ advances (and, in some cases, were quite passionate about their … investigations) before booking them. Long prison terms, psychiatric “treatment”, and public humiliation were common outcomes of these investigations. For most of the 20th century, there were very, very few public places in most of America for men to meet each other. There was certainly no public space friendlier to gays in Boise, Idaho, than the library and park bathrooms when Sen. Craig was a young man. I call them preliminaries because they preface more intricate coded behavior that can indicate a variety of things: whose stall the contact will happen; what activities are amenable to either party; whether money will change hands; whether there is a lookout; whether the place itself is safe; and much more. “Tearooms,” as these bathrooms are called, established an entire non-verbal dialectic to facilitate sexual union between American men. They are as enshrined in gay culture as Sunday afternoon “tea dances,” or Bette Midler singing at the baths, or Stonewall, or, currently, Internet dating. Even for me, as a young gay man from Wisconsin curious about gay sex in the mid-1980s, the park restrooms were the place where it all happened. The restrooms were not just an urban legend: they were living history — noisy, confusing, heady, stinky, and nervewracking places for a sexual — and cultural — initiation. The codes that Craig and his arresting officer used (looking through the stall door; tapping one’s foot; touching your stall neighbor’s foot) are historical preliminaries to sexual contact.
Which leads me to this: we do not live in the 1930s anymore, or even the 1980s. One can make the distinction now between furtive behavior and discreet behavior. There are lots of ways by which and places where men can meet other men to wine, dine, kiss, screw, get married, or just civilly unionize. It doesn’t have to happen in the bathroom, unless that is what you choose. I feel some fondness for tearooms, where men would look at me, then just 18, like I was Ganymede come back to earth. There is an excitement and danger and kink to public sex that I still enjoy, in empty cemeteries on moonless nights with someone I like, offending only the dead. There are so many ways to meet someone and approximate the thrill of the tearooms. We could say that Sen. Craig was just unimaginative, or wouldn’t have it any other way; I think he hadn’t caught up with the ways gay culture has changed, and he didn’t know how.
But it’s never too late: if I were him, I’d be on Craig’s list with a crotch shot and a “married, discreet” tag.
Well, TB, I do wonder how much longer those tags will actually apply to Larry (which isn’t to say that, given his traditional approach to truth-telling, he won’t find them repeatedly useful). The Republican Party, however, no longer finds him useful.
"He sounded almost as convincing as, "I did not have sex with that woman,’ " Gary Bauer told NYT’s Sheryl Gay Stolberg, whose accounting of the “What NEXT?!” Party’s latest adventurers repeatedly achieves unintentional hilarity.
"The real question for Republicans in Washington is how low can you go, because we are approaching a level of ridiculousness, " said [Gooper strategist Scott] Reed, sounding exasperated in an interview on Tuesday morning. "You can’t make this stuff up. And the impact this is having on the grass-roots around the country is devastating. Republicans think the governing class in Washington are a bunch of buffoons who have total disregard for the principles of the party, the law of the land and the future of the country. "
So, moving with a pre-emptive alacrity they’d eschewed in the cases of Mark Foley, Jack Abramoff, David Vitter, Ted Stevens, Rick Renzi, Thomas Ravenel, or Bob Allen, the “Republicans in Washington” rared right up in righteousness. Kane again:
Senate Republican leaders issued a rare joint statement minutes before Craig’s news conference, complaining that none of them had been told of his legal troubles until yesterday. The senators asked the ethics committee to investigate the matter, vowing to consider other punitive sanctions.
“This is a serious matter. Due to the reported and disputed circumstances, and the legal resolution of this serious case, we will recommend that Senator Craig’s incident be reported to the Senate Ethics Committee for its review. In the meantime, leadership is examining other aspects of the case to determine if additional action is required,” Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), Minority Whip Trent Lott (Miss.) and three other elected leaders[*] said.
The only GOP leader not on the statement is Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.); he is the vice chairman of the ethics panel, to which Craig’s case is being referred.
[* The other three are Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican conference leader; Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, the policy committee chairwoman; and John Ensign of Nevada, chairman of the party's Senate campaign committee, according to NYT's Patti Murphy and David Stout.]
On Monday, Larry still headed Mitt Romney’s Idaho campaign. On Tuesday, reports Kane, Mitt (sniffing piously)
compared Craig’s behavior to President Bill Clinton’s encounter with a White House intern and to the case of Mark Foley (R-Fla.), who resigned from the House of Representatives last year in a scandal involving male pages.
“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,” Romney said on CNBC’s “Kudlow & Company.” “We’ve seen disappointment in the White House, we’ve seen it in the Senate, we’ve seen it in Congress. And frankly, it’s disgusting.”
Certain Idahoans are disgusted, all right. Though Larry apologized to them for “the cloud placed over Idaho” (Milbank: “Actually, the cloud is over Craig, not his home state. But it’s easy to see how Craig might overestimate the size of his shadow: He has a wide stance”), late last night, TPM’s Eric Kleefeld reported:
A new poll taken today by SurveyUSA shows that Senator Larry Craig’s (R-ID) political standing has apparently taken a massive hit. A majority of Idaho adults, 55%, say the Senator should resign, compared to only 34% who say he should remain in office. And his approval rating is only the same percentage as those who say he should not resign, 34%, compared to 58% disapproval.
By contrast, his fellow Idaho Senator, Mike Crapo (R), enjoys a 61% approval rating, with only 26% disapproval — meaning the Republican brand is not damaged in Idaho, just the Larry Craig brand.
(Check the other results for a quick-&-dirty early read of the succession race.)
This is a sad, sad spectacle: a human being grown old and stupified in self-loathing learned from a bigoted culture. But Larry Craig has spent years upon years promoting that culture and doing all he could to see that the laws of our land foist it on the rest of us. So it’s with something less than full empathy that I recommend to him Bino’s excellent advice for those who tell stall tales.
lotus
UPDATE: See also at NYT, Report Cites Other Arrests at Airport.
