Here’s the part where I’m supposed to come up with something wickedly witty about Larry Craig tapping away in an airport men’s room. Some clever wordplay, some pun on “undercover” or “flushing his career down the toilet” or something like that.
Sorry. Can’t do it.
Not that hypocrisy isn’t among the very richest veins a satirist taps for chuckles, and how much better does it get than that old favorite, the paragon of rectitude caught with his pants down?
It doesn’t get much better than that. But I still can’t do it. Not this time.
There’s something about this one that has me shaking my head instead of smacking my lips. What it is, I think, was the sight of Larry Craig standing before all those microphones in downtown Boise on Tuesday, his wife at his side and his life unraveling.
“I am not gay,” Larry Craig insisted. “I never have been gay.”
And then the tortured explanations for why he’d done what he’d done in that men’s room and how it had been misconstrued. Why he’d signed what he signed afterward and how he shouldn’t have signed it. How his judgment had been all jangled up because of the local newspaper looking into rumors about his personal life.
False rumors, Larry Craig insisted. “I am not gay,” he said, again.
He tried to sound defiant. He looked like he’d been hit by a truck.
And that was before his fellow politicians bailed on him.
And wasn’t that an edifying spectacle? “If you want a friend in Washington,” goes the old line, “get a dog.” Colleagues and comrades, people Larry Craig had worked with for years, for decades they couldn’t have dropped him more quickly if someone had announced they were giving away winning Powerball tickets in the next room. If someone had said that Larry Craig had a contagious disease.
Which, of course, he did.
Fear.
Fear of exposure. Fear of ridicule, and retribution. Fear of defeat.
How frightened do you have to be to go through what Larry Craig went through in Minneapolis the arrest, the fingerprinting, the mug shots and then tell nobody about any of it for months?
For that matter, how frightening must it be to have urges so strong that a public man, with a public reputation to protect and a lengthy voting record to live up to, still finds himself reduced to tapping out coded signals to the total stranger in the next stall?
Why is this a good thing? Aside from full employment for late-night comics, that is.
Why is it a desirable state of affairs to have certain people scared to death of who they are, and what they feel? To have to play at “manlier-than-thou” for fear of being found out and demonized? To feel the need to demonize others, if only to deflect suspicion? To get used to demonizing others, because that’s where the votes are?
Why is this a good thing?
Later a few days, or a few weeks from now there’ll be time enough for my righteous indignation about this latest great deception. There may even come a time when I’ll feel like saying something halfway amusing about it.
But for now? Just sadness. For Larry Craig, and for all the other Larry Craigs out there.
Rick Horowitz is a nationally syndicated columnist. His e-mail address is rickhoro@execpc.com.
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