What Do Larry Craig And Lou DeLuca Have In Common? by Doug Wrenn

What Do Larry Craig And Lou DeLuca Have In Common?

By Doug Wrenn

September 04, 2007

In answer to the question I posed in the subject line, Democrats would undoubtedly, hastily and zealously remind us that both recently scandalized public leaders are Republicans, and many people of various political stripes might even first assume that I am suggesting a possibility far more sexually titillating. I'm not. What I am calling to your attention, however, is the rather big, but apparently invisible elephant in the middle of the room: both men now have criminal records.

My unabashed ideological and partisan preferences are hardly a big secret, yet I can't stand lemmings and flacks from either side. I can hardly stand to listen to the radio any more. When we aren't listening to myopic and immoral Democrats, with all too convenient memory lapses, bashing Lou Deluca and demanding his crucifixion, we are listening to Republicans defending Lou DeLuca, bashing Democrats for their various scandals and often at the same time, hypocritically further bashing them for castigating St. John of Rowland, as if he was as pure as the white driven snow. Perhaps I will never enjoy being so canonized and venerated as Sir Squinty Eyes Himself, but despite the conspicuous absence of a halo over my head, my loyalty ends abruptly where my honor begins. Shame on the rest of you, from both sides of the aisle! Only Faust could appreciate your shallow character, both bought and wrought with sheer hypocrisy.

Now to further stink up the radio waves, we have to listen to the incessant replay of the disgusting adventures of Lavatory Larry. To reply to his recent speech and vehement denial, I personally couldn't care less if Larry Craig is or isn't gay. For that matter, I don't care if he was signaling and playing footsie under the restroom stall wall with a man, a woman, or an armadillo. Lavatory Larry, like the rest of the country, missed the bigger picture here. The allegation is that this (now former) US Senator was seeking sex from a stranger in a public toilet. Am I really the only one who finds that consummately degenerate, freakish behavior utterly revolting?

As I have previously written, I think the world of State Senator Lou DeLuca, who has bravely and aggressively fought many an uphill battle and crusade near and dear to my heart. On a personal level, I forgive Senator DeLuca, and I ask that everyone else does the same, but forgiveness does not exempt anyone from soiling and keeping soiled the institution of the Connecticut General Assembly, and yes, sadly, I also recognize how much of an oxymoron that suggestion sounds like. That's ironically the problem.

The Dems are no angels, either, from DWI's to bribery, to child molestation, and on the sordid laundry list goes, but one wrong on one side in no way even remotely justifies another wrong on the other side and Republicans and Democrats, both in the Capitol and throughout the state are equally guilty of the tit for tat game. Congratulations, fellow citizens! You have now proven that you cannot be independently trusted any more than the ilk we all too often elect and send to Hartford and Washington, and yet you are still always amazingly aghast when their behavior runs afoul, but only, of course, if it is someone from the other side of the partisan aisle. Do the phrases, "Garbage in, garbage out," or "Consider the source" ring any bells? And regarding Senator DeLuca, yes, he fessed up and told the truth regarding offering his political influence in exchange for a "threat" against his allegedly spouse-abusing grandson-in-law, but only after DeLuca initially denied the charges made against him and the feds, in turn, then replayed the tape to him from the conversation he had with a wired undercover agent. As sports announcers sometimes say when covering baseball games, "Swing and a miss!" Furthermore, since when should anyone be recognized for doing what they already morally and ethically should do, such as telling the truth, anyway? Have we, along with the bar that we set, now really sunken that low?

I cannot attest to Larry Craig's actual innocence or guilt. From what I have heard of the tape, clearly, the cop screwed up. He had insufficient probable cause to make an arrest. He had no corroborating proof of Craig's guilt, other than the alleged inter-stall footsie game and the supposedly associated hand signals. There was never any admission of guilt by Craig, nor was there any actual offer of any particular sex act by Craig, be it for money or for free. The cop made a bad arrest. Craig never should have pleaded guilty, which he has even since conceded, but that concession is now too little and too late. He took the offered reduced plea bargain of guilty for disorderly conduct instead of lewd public behavior for whatever his motivation was at that time. In the eyes of the law, he's now guilty.

Craig was also nowhere near Idaho when he was arrested in this incident at the Minneapolis Airport, so presumably, the arresting undercover cop at first did not recognize who Craig was. Those seeking far-reaching conspiracy theories, now already spewing in abundance, might be better advised to re-focus their obsessions back onto UFO's and Elvis sightings. Craig's claims that he has a "wide stance" when sitting on the commode and that he attempted to pick up a dropped piece of toilet paper that the cop denies existed doesn't look good for Craig, given previous, although unsubstantiated similar claims made against him, and given that the cop described hand and foot signals given by Craig that are supposedly well known to law enforcement officials as common signals for stall crawling gay men seeking to engage like-minded strangers for partners in restroom sexual olympics. The bottom line, however, is that the arrest was bad, the plea is now engraved in stone, and Craig's extremely coincidentally based alibi seems about as credible as someone being struck by lightening three times in the same day, and while holding the winning Power Ball ticket. Having myself occupied many of a restroom stall (for the originally intended and far more common and mundane purpose), I can honestly say that I fortunately have never had so many clumsy and coincidental foibles of both hand and foot with my neighbor in the next stall in such a short period of time, as Lavatory Larry so matter-of-factly claimed actually happened to him, as if the occurrence of such events were both commonplace and innocuous. I also doubt that many people have also suffered such highly coincidental bad luck as our poor, recently "dethroned" US Senator from Idaho, whose apparently self-guiding but errant hands and feet have now gotten him into such hot water. I suppose to a certain degree it does make some sense that a politician, such as Craig, who is such a proponent of illegal immigration amnesty, does not recognize any boundary, be it to define and divide two neighboring but supposedly sovereign nations, or two neighboring but supposedly sovereign public restroom stalls. This might sadly even be the next up and coming political class: "Bureaucrats Without Borders." To the extent that any real conspiracy exists in this "Tale Of Two Toilets," I would suggest that we examine why a story that occurred in June is suddenly and mysteriously made public in very late August, but while that feasibly Democrat-driven political angle might be worth investigating, it still does not erase the incident itself. Indeed, depending which side of the aisle (or the stall) you occupy, Election 2008 can be either the "best of times," or "the worst of times."

If for no other reason, I'm glad that Craig resigned because the public discourse, despite the nationally insignificant but glamorized escapades of Paris Hilton, et al, has sunken to a new, graphically inappropriate and flagrantly lewd level not seen since "Monica-Gate." With the "wide stance" of monumental problems, priorities and issues facing both our world and our country today, I think we can all clean up our act and ramble on, if we must, about topics at least a little more substantive than the apparently all too common commode crawling escapades of a bunch of disgusting and disordered restroom reprobates seeking their "john" jollies, regardless of whatever their sexual preferences or job titles might be.

As a side bar to all of this, Democrats are now even further charged up by this latest of many recent GOP stumbles, and given the current state of the GOP and it's electoral chances in 2008, the timing couldn't be any worse. The Dems, however must remember that like the Republicans, they are also fallible, such as they were in 1994, when their various scandals back then turned the electoral tide red. Now the tables have similarly turned, and many of us have reason to be "blue," even if by different definitions of that term. But the Republicans, contrary to Democrat hype, are not hypocrites. Most Republicans still stand for family and traditional moral values (except in states like Connecticut, where most Republicans are either owned by or cowering in the corner from the liberal establishment, or are closet liberals themselves, if not Democrat Party moles), and much more so than the Democrats, who as a matter of platform and practice outright reject such values. All people are flawed sinners, some more or less so than others, and some in different or like ways as others, but we really did crucify the last perfect man on Earth 2007 years ago. Republicans are not hypocrites; they're just human, like everyone else, including Democrats. The only real difference between the two major parties in that regard is that Republicans, including Larry Craig and Lou DeLuca, to their credit, and despite their human flaws and failings, at least try to protect, preserve and advance a moral society. Democrats abjectly reject such values. There is a difference between those who embrace and advocate for evil vs. those who champion it but fall because they are mortals. Although I will concede, it is hard for Democrats to ever be labeled as hypocrites since they so constantly support outright evil and dysfunction anyway.

A loving parent trusts his or her child, but a good parent knows when not to trust his or her child. Like our political leaders, the majority of the partisan electorate has proven time and again that it cannot be trusted. With liberty comes responsibility. Those who forsake the latter cannot handle and do not deserve the former. Perhaps we are now a living and exemplified reason of George Washington's legendary distrust of, and distain for political parties. For all our genuinely hypocritical partisan bickering and whining about corrupt government, we first need to stop being part of the problem, and start being part of the solution. It is high time that we protect ourselves from ourselves in our very soiled and tainted representative republic, by putting the computer equivalent of "parental controls" on our government. We should demand, without compromise and under penalty of electoral removal from office, that our state and federal legislators of both major parties enact laws, whether they like them or not, that mandate resignation or termination from office of any and all elected officials who are convicted of committing any crime, be it a misdemeanor or a felony, while holding elected office. Only then can we keep both clean and transparent our government institutions, and maintain any real hope or semblance of truly ethical government with higher and uniformly applied standards for all.

Now for the daunting $64,000 question, how bad do we really want it?