How's this for political cynicism?
Rather than pressure Larry Craig to resign, the Republican Party leaders should get him in a back room somewhere and urge him to make a public statement, in which he renounces his Republican Party affiliation, and asks to be invited into the Democratic Party. They can pay him off with the same sort of lobbyist job he's going to get if he just resigns.
I mean, it's not like Craig has any chance of getting re-elected as a Senator from Idaho, and candidates for his seat when the election rolls around would be running against a Democrat with "San Francisco values." The Republicans will hold that seat in any case, so the campaign would just provide another opportunity to serve up some more red meat to their base.
Meantime, and here's the real beauty of my plan: the country could kick back and watch the Democrats do more squirming than nine buckets of salted earthworms.
It could backfire, I suppose. The Democrats would only have to step right up and embrace him. But that assumes the Democrats have spine. Care to bet on that?
3 comments:
I agree, TC. One of the worst parts of this whole affair is the underlying thread of "gay=bad."
I has been my sense the most of the leftosphere has picked up on this, as well, however much fun it is to chortle about the outing of yet another hypocritical Republican.
A caller to the Thom Hartmann show on Air America today said that Craig had voted with the democrats on the Patriot Act. Bush had called him a traitor and told Senate republicans to start looking for a replacement. If that's a credible statement there may be a reason the repubes haven't gathered around in support of Craig.
Absent any other evidence, this sounds like a conspiracy theory, and a fine one at that. So I did a little Googling.
Firedoglake, one of the big lefty blogs, supports the claim you reported, and has the exact "traitor" line. Their source also says that Craig joined the Dems' filibuster against permanent renewal of the Patriot Act. Unfortunately, the source is itself an opinion piece, and not all of its assertions are backed up with references.
It is true that Craig is on record [1, 2] as opposing at least some provisions of the Patriot Act.
Some right wing sites lambasted him for this, and others supported him, saying that he was doing it because he was afraid what President Hillary Clinton would do with such powers.
"What do you expect from wingnuts?" is the immediate reaction to this last bit, but I said all along that the Dems could have put the brakes on some of the imperial presidency actions merely by asking the right how they would feel if a Democratic president had such power.
Anyway, it's hard for me to believe that Bush, who is now as lame as a duck ever gets, could have swayed his whole party just to indulge his quest for revenge. I could see a call being made to or from the White House to make sure everyone would be on the same page, but I'm pretty sure the Reps in the Senate tossed Craig overboard of their own accord.
The party has to be seen as being consistent when yet another of its members is exposed for hypocrisy, dontcha know.
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