There they go again.
Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) was arrested in June at a Minnesota airport by a plainclothes police officer investigating lewd conduct complaints in a men’s public restroom, according to an arrest report obtained by Roll Call Monday afternoon.
Craig’s arrest occurred just after noon on June 11 at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. On Aug. 8, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct in the Hennepin County District Court. He paid more than $500 in fines and fees, and a 10-day jail sentence was stayed. He also was given one year of probation with the court that began on Aug. 8.
The question is was Craig scared into gay sex by looming black men like the Republican down in Florida.
UPDATE: Larry Craig is Mitt Romney’s Idaho campaign chair.
With today’s announcement, Senator Larry Craig said, “Our government is in need of a proven leader like Governor Romney, who will put in place benchmarks and streamline our government using proven conservative principles. His message is resonating with voters and I’m looking forward to helping him on his way to winning the Republican nomination.”
UPDATE 2: The Romney campaign is now scrubbing the web of information connecting Larry Craig and Mitt Romney.
Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) – who has pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct in connection with an incident where he allegedly solicited a plainclothes police officer in a men’s restroom – is one of Mitt Romney’s top backers in the Senate. A clip of Craig praising Romney was until just moments ago available on Romney’s YouTube channel, but is now listed as “a private video.”
Explaining why he’s backing Romney, Craig says in the video that it’s in part because “he has very strong family values.”
“That’s something I grew up with and believe in,” Craig explains.
That video is now apparently literally and figuratively inoperative.
UPDATE 3: YouTube video of Larry Craig calling Bill Clinton a “nasty boy” on Meet the Press from 1999.
Looming black men who wait in bathrooms for lightning-heavy inclement weather, no less.
You Libruls just don’t understand what it’s like being a Republican and being surrounded by big, black airport baggage handlers. The only way out is to smoke some pole.
Maybe he was afraid of the looming black men down in Florida and just decided not to take any chances.
There have been rumors of Larry Craig’s orientation for some time.
Here’s another video for Larry Craig:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX4DyFZqfWg&mode=related&search=
God damn. Is this enough to make him resign? Considering what he said about Clinton, I think it should be.
To backup C.S., and also because it’s just so effin’ funny, hat tip Atrios:
Knock three times
On the crapper
If you want me
Twice on the urinal
If the answer is no.
Unless there’s more to the police report than we’re seeing, this is a ridiculous case. Busted for tapping his foot?
You might think so Quaker, but why plead out?
Busted for tapping his foot, touching the cop’s foot and waving his hand under the parition, actually.
It is a bullshit arrest, though. The idea that you can get busted for soliciting consensual sex is pretty warped.
And the fact that our society drives gay men, literally, into the (water) closet is pretty sad.
But when it comes to Craig, the issue is not that he’s gay, or whether the rap is righteous, it’s that he’s yet another dishonest Republican hypocrite
I have to admit, when I read that piece of that interview, I laughed. But did Craig really say that? I can’t imagine a United States Senator (even one that does know secret bathroom foot tapping codes) calling the President a “naughty boy” on Meet The Press.
You might think so Quaker, but why plead out?
Why plead out? To try to avoid publicity, of course.
Look, I’m not saying the undercover cop came to the wrong conclusion. I’m just saying that I think it would be really difficult for a prosecutor to get a “lewd conduct” conviction against someone for tapping his foot.
Either way, trial or no trial, Craig is cooked. He apparently had given an interview to his hometown paper a month earlier specifically on the question of his sexual orientation. Go see Josh Marshall for details.
Poetic justice or divine intervention? Either way works.
I read the police report, this guy is a pro. Yes there was definitely entrapment, though I have to say that as a gay man myself, I can’t stand having a guy peering into my stall. Still it doesn’t say what the undercover cop did at that point. To be fair, I don’t think lots of gay men do this because they’re forced into it; they do it because they find it exciting and a bit on the edge. Hell, wouldn’t lots of straight men do it if they could? But it is sad that in this day and age a man feels such a need to hide and deny his gayness.
bobbo, I’m not really sure what he did wrong under the criminal code. Soliciting consensual sex from an adult, especially in the coy way Craig did, isn’t illegal now is it? Now if Craig was doing the deed in the toilet that would be another story. I hope we haven’t criminalized being gay again.
There must be more to this story. And since Sen. Craig is 100% not gay (he said so himself) then there MUST be a reason for his pleading guilty.
Or Craig is living in a VERY deep closet. How said.
Hell, wouldn’t lots of straight men do it if they could?
Well, there it is.
The wingers who holler the loudest about the “promiscuity of the gay lifestyle” would be total sluts if their world was filled with willing, anonymous, female partners.
OK, maybe they don’t holler as loud as guys like Larry here, but you know what I mean.
Republican judge Edward Nottingham did something similar. He confessed that he was too drunk to remember how he spent $3,000 in a strip club on 9/5/05. AP reported that the interviewed a Mr. Frankel of the Denver Diamond Cabaret strip club, who said the GOP judge visited the strip club multiple times. His wife only has one bill and there is no record who paid for Judge Nottingham’s other visits to the strip club. According to 9 news in Denver, Judge Nottingham’s wife said he spent over $500 to visit an Internet site from the judge’s chambers offering porno pictures and introductions to women wanting sex tonight