BartBlog

Much has been made of Idaho Senator Larry Craig’s arrest a few months back for soliciting sex from an undercover police officer in an airport bathroom. Craig pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for disorderly conduct hoping the whole incident would go away and it may have except for the work of certain bloggers. The furor over the incident has risen to such heights that Craig announced his resignation on Saturday.

There have been many stories written about Craig’s problems, with most taking either the “he didn’t do it” side and he should be left alone or the “he did do it” side and he should suffer the consequences, and all that is fine. However, what really bothers me in all this is the attitude of people like Ariana Huffington of the Huffington Post. In her post yesterday Huffington questioned whether is was a good use of law enforcement to stop illicit sex in airport restrooms in the age of terrorism. Huffington claims to be no fan of Craig but feels that law enforcement resources would be better served elsewhere. Interesting coming from a woman who married a man she allegedly didn’t know was gay and then divorced him taking millions from him in the process. I wonder how Huffington would feel if she had a son using an airport restroom that was suddenly approached by a man looking for sex. Sex in public places is illegal regardless of whether its straight or gay. Clearly Huffington is not thinking clearly.

Whatever your opinion of Craig’s behavior, law enforcement has a duty to protect the public from sexual predators, and soliciting sex in a restroom is predatory. Huffington and anyone that feels the same way about the use of police in this case is just plain dumb.

Tim Grieve, Salon, September 4, 2007

When Larry Craig announced Saturday that he was stepping down from the Senate, he said that he was doing so because to “pursue” his “legal options” would be “an unwanted and unfair distraction of my job and for my Senate colleagues.”

Pursue his legal options? So far as we know, Craig doesn’t have a whole lot of “legal options” to pursue. With the senator having pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct in the Minnesota men’s room incident, Craig’s legal case is over and done with unless he can somehow show that his plea arose out of some “manifest injustice” — i.e., that he didn’t understand that he had the right to an attorney, a trial, etc., or that he didn’t understand the charge against him. If Craig thinks it was embarrassing to be caught playing footsie under a men’s room stall, we can’t wait to hear how a sitting U.S. senator would explain that he didn’t understand that criminal defendants have constitutional rights. And as for not understanding the charge against him? Craig admitted that charge, under oath and in writing, and we’re having a hard time seeing how he argues now that he didn’t understand it then.

Memo to Craig: Not understanding that a guilty plea would come back to bite you isn’t the same as not understanding the guilty plea in the first place.

So what “legal options” is Craig really pursuing? What he really meant, surely, is that he hoped to avoid the “legal problems” he was going to face if he stayed on in the Senate. The Senate Ethics Committee was ready to launch an investigation into Craig’s conduct, and National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman John Ensign was already raising the specter of public hearings. With Craig on his way out the door — his last day on the job will be Sept. 30 — it’s unlikely that the Ethics Committee will do anything more than fade away on this matter.

Craig? Not so much. As Roll Call reports, the soon-to-be-former senator has hired a “crisis team” to help him “lift the cloud he’s been operating under.” Billy Martin will handle communications; Stanley Brand will deal with the Ethics Committee, if necessary; and Minneapolis attorney Tom Kelly wil see if there’s any way to do undo that guilty plea.

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Paul Krugman, The New York Times, September 3, 2007

In February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressing the United Nations Security Council, claimed to have proof that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He did not, in fact, present any actual evidence, just pictures of buildings with big arrows pointing at them saying things like “Chemical Munitions Bunker.” But many people in the political and media establishments swooned: they admired Mr. Powell, and because he said it, they believed it.

Mr. Powell’s masters got the war they wanted, and it soon became apparent that none of his assertions had been true.

Until recently I assumed that the failure to find W.M.D., followed by years of false claims of progress in Iraq, would make a repeat of the snow job that sold the war impossible. But I was wrong. The administration, this time relying on Gen. David Petraeus to play the Colin Powell role, has had remarkable success creating the perception that the “surge” is succeeding, even though there’s not a shred of verifiable evidence to suggest that it is.

Thus Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution – the author of “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq” – and his colleague Michael O’Hanlon, another longtime war booster, returned from a Pentagon-guided tour of Iraq and declared that the surge was working. They received enormous media coverage; most of that coverage accepted their ludicrous self-description as critics of the war who have been convinced by new evidence.

A third participant in the same tour, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, reported that unlike his traveling companions, he saw little change in the Iraq situation and “did not see success for the strategy that President Bush announced in January.” But neither his dissent nor a courageous rebuttal of Mr. O’Hanlon and Mr. Pollack by seven soldiers actually serving in Iraq, published in The New York Times, received much media attention.

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Glenn Greenwald, Salon, September 3, 2007

Thomas Sowell, from his Townhall column today:

We all believe that people are innocent until proven guilty. Some on the left believe that they are innocent even after being proven guilty.
Thomas Sowell, March 2007, on Lewis Libby’s conviction on four felony counts:

In the course of this pointless investigation, it turned out that some of Scooter Libby’s statements conflicted with the statements of some reporters. So Libby was prosecuted for perjury and obstruction of justice — and a Washington jury convicted him.

A man’s life has been ruined because his memories differed from that of others — whose memories also differed among themselves — and media liberals are exulting as if their conspiracy theories had been vindicated.

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Ray Bennett, Editor and Publisher, September 2, 2007

VENICE – Veteran director Brian De Palma’s filmmaking skills have seldom been as razor sharp as they are in his sensational new film about members of a U.S. Army squad who rape and murder a 15-year-old Iraqi girl and slay her family.

Made on HD video and employing images from digital cameras, video recorders, Internet uploads and old-fashioned film, De Palma’s movie is a ferocious argument against the engagement in Iraq for what it is doing to everyone involved.

Made so expertly that it appears to be assembled from genuine footage, the film details the extraordinary psychological pressure suffered by young soldiers on checkpoint duty in occupied areas of Iraq, and then follows one unit as two of its members skew monstrously out of control.

De Palma’s screenplay is outstanding, and he draws wonderfully naturalistic performances from his youthful cast. Sympathetic to the young men who lose their way in horrible circumstances but unflinching in its depiction of the horrors that can result, the film is harrowing, but it should find responsive audiences everywhere.

A fictional story based on real events, “Redacted” distills images from an array of sources to tell its story, beginning with those captured by Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), a young soldier who hopes they will buy his way into film school. Clean-cut Lawyer McCoy (Rob Devaney) also wields a video camera, but Salazar goes to extremes making a daily record of almost everything he sees.

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Glen Greenwald, Salon, September 1, 2007

Here is John McCain’s “straight talk”, in defense of traditional marriage yesterday, regarding the Iowa state court’s decision declaring unconstitutional that state’s opposite-sex-only marriage law:

John McCain also entered the fray last night, calling the decision “a loss for the traditional family,” and noting that he supports “the traditional definition of marriage as between one man and one woman.”

By stark contrast, this is John McCain’s “straight action”:

McCain was still married and living with his wife in 1979 while, according to The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, “aggressively courting a 25-year-old woman who was as beautiful as she was rich.” McCain divorced his wife, who had raised their three children while he was imprisoned in Vietnam, then launched his political career with his new wife’s family money.

How can John McCain claim to believe that the law should recognize only “traditional marriages” while simultaneously demanding that the law recognize his own so-called “second marriage” — also known as “an adulterous relationship” under the precepts of “traditional marriage” (Mark 10:11 — “And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her”).

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