Larry Craig: A Comeback?
This is almost too nuts to be true, but: Larry Craig is reconsidering his resignation. Earlier he stated that he’d resign at the end of September, but has changed his mind. This seems to be a pattern for Craig, who pled guilty to “disorderly conduct” for his interaction with a police officer in a Minneapolis-St. Paul airport toilet—and then later said that he regretted the guilty plea, having made it merely in the hope that the whole affair would then go away quietly (which it almost did).
The Republican Party leadership needed a plausible excuse for throwing Larry Craig under the bus, in contrast to their supporting David Vitter. The primary reasons they’d actually support Vitter are because he was involved with a women (yes, a prostitute, and yes, apparently their arrangement included diapers, but it’s still “straight” sex, right?) and because Craig comes from a state with a Republican governer and so would be replaced with a Republican (whereas Vitter would be replaced by a Democrat). Neither of those sound good, however, so they chose another reason: because Craig has a conviction on his record, whereas Vitter doesn’t. Given that Vitter has more or less confessed to paying for sex, this is a little strange, but it’s true at the moment that there’s no conviction, so it works as a reason right now. It gives them convenient moral cover, asking for the resignation of the Senator who pled guilty.
Larrry Craig has retained legal counsel, however, and may be trying to overturn the guilty plea. How he could do that I have no idea, but one never knows. In the meantime, the mainly irrelevant but still pleasing distraction of watching the Republicans have to deal with more media attention for Craig will remain around as entertainment.