Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Craig indicts himself


Idahoans have good reason to wince and cringe as their senior U.S. Senator, Larry Craig, continues his clumsy and ill-conceived strategy to wiggle out of the airport rest room arrest that has made him almost a comic caricature.

It's an incomprehensible, pitiable spectacle that reduces Sen. Craig's stature and needlessly turns a once-respected Idaho political figure into a buffoon.

He had pleaded guilty then claimed he's innocent. He wanted the humiliation of "signaling" a police officer in an adjoining restroom stall to go away, but now senior Republicans want him to go away. Craig said he intends to resign, then said he won't resign if he can convince a judge to allow him to withdraw his guilty plea. He said he didn't understand the arrest allegations, although he's spent nearly 30 years reading and deciding complicated legislative documents. He said he acted unwisely because of "pressure" from a newspaper investigation into rumors about his sexual preferences, although senate political pressure doesn't faze him.

Our original suggestion that he resign is even more emphatic now.

Sen. Craig seems to be blindly obsessed with his own vanity, unable to see how foolish he looks in his compulsion to find some way of exonerating his distressing behavior in an airport restroom.

Whatever Idahoans believe about Sen. Craig's private inclinations is irrelevant. The senator's current behavior leaves the unsettling impression that he has lost the ability to think clearly and thus deal with the mounting challenges in Washington.

He should give it up and resign so Idaho has a full complement of representatives in the nation's capital.




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