As someone who's always been a big fan of the fall of Rome, can I just take a second to pose the question, what in the hell is going on in the Republican Party?
For those not in the know, this week brought the recent arrest of Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) to light--an arrest for apparently using some sort of "secret gay code" to signal a man in a bathroom stall next to him that he was up for, oh, whatever(NSFW*). Unfortunately for Sen. Craig, his potential "wingman" turned out to be one of Minnesota's finest. Well, maybe not finest. (Did I mention that this happened in a Minneapolis airport? And I thought liberals were supposed to be the elitists. Well, look who's too good for the restrooms at the public parks and recreation department, all of a sudden.)
At any rate, all of this may or may not be true. Sen. Craig has since renounced his guilty plea, insisting that it was simply an effort to make a bad misunderstanding go away. Whuteva. Excuse my french, but I've been doin' m'bidness in bathrooms, jungles and deserts for over 30 years, and have not once come remotely close to accidentally leading someone to believe, in the process, that I was in the market for any... oh, you know. But I digress.
Okay, so he enters a plea, and gets on with his life. Well, that was pretty smart, wasn't it? Why insist on your innocence when it's just as easy to plead guilty. Oh, and then not tell:
Your lawyer
Your wife
Your family
or
Your staff
that it EVER HAPPENED. Because, as we all know, these things never come to back to haunt us.
And it gets better. Apparently, rumors about the good senator have been circulating since 1982. Not that that means anything in and of itself, but what makes it so classic is that in 1999, Sen. Craig had this to say. (Bonus points: Be sure and check out Chris Matthews's deadpan stare after the camera cuts back to him from the Craig footage. In fact, watch that a couple of times, and try to put a heavy techno-rave beat behind Craig's words. There's money to be made here, I guaran-effing-tee it.)
But whatever. Is Craig a hypocrite? I guess the proof is in the pudding. A great big bowl of homoerotic pudding. Regardless, he's either a public liar or a perjurist. Either he lied to the court when knowingly entered a false plea of guilt--which is, oddly, illegal--or he's lying to the public now about the nature of the whole thing. Either way, a big thanks to James Dobson for helping to fill the halls of Congress with confused, self-hating, hypocritical nutjobs like Craig.
But Craig is just the tip of the iceberg. A huge, homoerotic iceberg. Let us not forget Bob Allen, the Florida State Representative, who offered an undercover cop $20, not for the cop's services, mind you, but for the opportunity to "service" the cop. (And, because I know you'll thinking I'm making this up, be sure and check out the good representative's Florida House page, where his recreational interests are listed as... yep, you guessed it.)
Also in Florida, U.S. Representative Mark Foley (again, proud Republican) managed to make being a congressional page even creepier than it automatically seems it would naturally be. Outside the official Party lines, we have geniuses like Ted Haggard, noted evangelist, politico and gay-hater, outed by his long-time male gigolo, who just couldn't abide Ted's public gay-bashing along side his private adultery. And patron saint of the morbidly obese right, Rush Limbaugh, who, after copping to doctor-shopping his way to a mountain of Oxycontin, was caught in customs during a trip to the Dominican Republic with a bottle of viagra, with a prescription not his own. Okay, let's for a moment forget the legality of the prescription, or the fact that prostitution, gay, straight, and otherwise is rampant in the DR... what, from a Conservative Christian, Right-Wing Republican, Straight White American Male perspective, what in the hell is an unmarried, Christian man doing with a bottle full of viagra? Perhaps Brother David can cover this one.
My point here is not to "persecute" these men for their sexuality. Maybe for their adultery, but not their sexuality. It's just, Christ, how long to have to put up with this sham? How long do we have to play this jackass game, where people are compelled to curry favors with voters--often dupes driven by the most ignorant, literal reading of a given liturgy possible--by raging against the very thing that they truly are? You know what we really need here? A witch hunt. Who gives a shit if are now, or have ever been a communist? What we really want to know is...
All I'm saying is, if Osama bin Laden were a 17-year-old boy, possibly in a public bathroom somewhere... we would've found him by now.
*Special note: You know, you just know, in your heart of hearts, what I was thinking of leading off this post with. Fortunately, thanks to Google, I can see I've already been beaten to the punch over ELEVEN HUNDRED TIMES.
*Not Safe For Work... suckas.