NEVER MIND THAT Idaho Sen. Larry Craig just pleaded guilty to a sex-related misdemeanor, or that he'd tried to keep it secret from his colleagues, his constituents, and his own family, or all the other glaring inconsistencies.
There is one thing - and apparently only one thing - that the once-obscure "family values" Republican wanted America to know when he finally went before the cameras yesterday.
"I am not gay," said the 62-year-old Craig, holding hands with his wife - kind of in the same way that Richard Nixon once insisted he was not "a crook," except that Craig somehow made gayness itself sound worse than any felony.
"I have never been gay."
It was a moment of true political weirdness, a verbal homage to the 1950s and the era of McCarthyism, of "Are you now or have you ever been a Communist?" Fitting, because Craig's comment also echoed an era - bygone, most thought - when it was indeed virtually a crime for a U.S. politician to be a homosexual.
Ironically, Craig - whose Senate career seemed to be winding down even before his arrest in a Minneapolis airport men's room stall - could have at least tamped down this budding scandal in the dog days of August by keeping his mouth shut.
Instead, he managed not only to give what pundits agreed was one of the worst political performances in a generation, but he also revealed himself - and perhaps his political party - to be at least a generation behind the American zeitgeist.
"[Of] the many bizarre statements that politicians have made over the years, this certainly has to rank among the strangest," legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin said on CNN after watching Craig proclaim his innocence in a case in which he had admitted his guilt earlier this month.
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There is one thing - and apparently only one thing - that the once-obscure "family values" Republican wanted America to know when he finally went before the cameras yesterday.
"I am not gay," said the 62-year-old Craig, holding hands with his wife - kind of in the same way that Richard Nixon once insisted he was not "a crook," except that Craig somehow made gayness itself sound worse than any felony.
"I have never been gay."
It was a moment of true political weirdness, a verbal homage to the 1950s and the era of McCarthyism, of "Are you now or have you ever been a Communist?" Fitting, because Craig's comment also echoed an era - bygone, most thought - when it was indeed virtually a crime for a U.S. politician to be a homosexual.
Ironically, Craig - whose Senate career seemed to be winding down even before his arrest in a Minneapolis airport men's room stall - could have at least tamped down this budding scandal in the dog days of August by keeping his mouth shut.
Instead, he managed not only to give what pundits agreed was one of the worst political performances in a generation, but he also revealed himself - and perhaps his political party - to be at least a generation behind the American zeitgeist.
"[Of] the many bizarre statements that politicians have made over the years, this certainly has to rank among the strangest," legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin said on CNN after watching Craig proclaim his innocence in a case in which he had admitted his guilt earlier this month.
Discuss Add this link to... Bury
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