Craig Ethics Complaint Backfires on GOP

AP via SFGate ^ | 10/12/7 | CHARLES BABINGTON, Associated Press Writer

[SmithL]

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Larry who?

Now that scandal-tinged Idaho Sen. Larry Craig has reneged on a pledge to resign this fall, his fellow Republican senators act as though they hardly know him. They want voters to forget him, too.

But they privately acknowledge that an earlier strategy to drive Craig from office has backfired, sticking them with an open-ended ethics investigation likely to keep the issue before the public for months.

Senate Republicans demanded the Ethics Committee inquiry into his sex-sting conviction last summer in hopes of forcing Craig to resign. He essentially called their bluff this month when he reversed his decision to resign Sept. 30 unless a court let him drop his guilty plea.

Now Republicans are powerless to stop a process almost certain to do more political damage to the party in general than to a retiring senator.

"I think they were a little fanciful" in urging the Senate's Select Committee on Ethics to take up the matter, said Stanley Brand, a Washington lawyer for Craig. He called the strong-arm strategy "ethical waterboarding," referring to the controversial interrogation technique.

Some senators had pointedly warned Craig that any ethics committee hearings might be public, and probably televised.

While public hearings are possible, lawyers and Senate staffers familiar with the committee say closed sessions seem more likely. The last public hearings were held 17 years ago, in the "Keating Five" case. The "Keating Five" case was a congressional scandal involving the widespread failure of savings and loans institutions.

[SmithL]

The AssPress is positively giddy at the prospect of dragging Republicans through the muck.

[goldstategop]

Larry Craig put his personal welfare ahead of his party's and the country's. He's a roach and the best cure is the strong sunlight of heavy publicity.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

[AppyPappy]

Not in this case. They have to drag homosexuals through the muck as well.

[SmithL]

Except they celebrate perversity!

[AppyPappy]

Yeah but we aren’t supposed to talk about it. They are good dressers who are sweet to old ladies and sponge paint their living rooms. They don’t hang out in rest rooms and parks playing “Hide the Salami”.

[smonk]

sometimes even politicians do something simply because it’s just the right thing to do.

[weegee]

Tap dancing around the issue.

[fweingart]

Republicans are about as brave as a scarecrow.

This whole episode of Craig tapping his foot in a men's toilet is beyond simpleminded.

I think of the cop who has nothing better to do than to sit enclosed in a toilet stall all the while smelling the odors that emanate from stalls whose occupants never heard of a courtesy flush. What kind of life or career is that?

He probably got really excited when Craig began tapping his foot and you'd think the cop would have seen the earphone and realized that the senator was merely keeping time with his IPod.

[Perchant]

So what happens? After an ethics inquiry do they vote on removing him? If that is the case, and Craig is truly found to be guilty, the Republicans will vote to remove him but the party of Barney Frank and Bill Clinton would be in the very difficult spot of passing judgment on a politician about sex.

[Sgt_Schultze]

The last public hearings were held 17 years ago, in the "Keating Five" case. The "Keating Five" case was a congressional scandal involving the widespread failure of savings and loans institutions.

And the last remaining tainted senator is still in office, unabashedly and repeatedly trying to close the barn door after the horses have left. The MSM has helped him to resuscitate his name and career that he is now running for president, again.

[weegee]

The Lavender Mafia has been pushing for decriminalizing the acts that Larry was supposedly motioning for using non-verbal communication.

They feel that such laws unfairly target people who suffer from same sex attraction syndrome.

Perhaps they should be pushing for an end to segregated bathrooms instead. One door for men and women. Everyone gets a stall.

[AppyPappy]

No. Probably they had received a lot of complaints about sexual behavior in the restroom. A restroom that kids use.

[jmaroneps37]

The low life who wrote this can’t imagine that the GOP would bring and press the ethics charges against one of its perverts because it is the RIGHT thing to do. In his/her ethically cloudy mind EVERYTHING is about political power and nothing is about doing what is right.

[Cyropaedia]

Perhaps they should be pushing for an end to segregated bathrooms instead. One door for men and women. Everyone gets a stall.

Imagine the *toe-tapping* you'd have then...

[fweingart]

A restroom that kids use.

Who in their right mind would send a child into a restroom unaccompanied?

[kbennkc]

I wish the Keating 5 hearings would run again . Hasn’t everyone seen every MASH episode ? May be a problem with equal time , with Senator John pass a law before I steal again McCain .

[George W. Bush]

The Stupid Party shoots itself in the foot again.

Naturally, the Dims will want to help with some first aid.

No doubt, they'll revive McCain's old Keating Five scandal as a reminder of the Duke Cunningham scandal as well.

Then they'll deliberate over the selectiveness of the inquiry, trying to decide ever so fairly why Craig is being investigated but not Vitter with his phone sex whore thing.

The media will lap it up, tossing in some reminders of Mark Foley.

Mitch McConnell can't be very bright to have stumbled into this little fiasco. What it reveals is how incompetent the Senate really is. You don't start into something like this unless you know exactly how it will unfold at every step, much as a lawyer conducts a trial, never asking a question of a witness that he doesn't already know the answer to.

It's hard to believe that of all those GOP senators and their aides, no one apparently thought to ask "what will we do if he doesn't resign?". Idiots.

I think our senators are really incredibly stupid. Lame second-rate lawyers, too lazy to chase ambulances, including the ones on the Judiciary committee. To his rare credit, Arlen Spectre did try to hold them back on this.

[Leo Farnsworth]

Craig did more than just tap his foot. He put his hand under the partition separating stalls. It’s a homo come-on.

Craig is a PERVERT.

Period.

[Theodore R.]

Most of the Republican “leadership”, including GWB, also put their own interests ahead of the party and the nation. That does not excuse Craig, but he is one of many.

[AppyPappy]

Who said they were unaccompanied?