Culture of Corruption

So, Larry Craig is gone. He solicited sex without actually soliciting sex or having sex. He pled guilty, but not to lewd behavior — to disorderly conduct (a misdemeanor). He is said to have a secret life involving same sex partners, but where are all these partners? According to one report, a guy in college believes Craig hit on him in 1967. Another says he “believes” he performed oral sex on the senator in a restroom at Union Station. He’s not 100-percent sure. If Craig has been living this secret life since 1967, you’d think others would come forward at some point. Maybe they will. So far, they haven’t. Indeed, where is all the evidence of Craig’s seedy life? Where are the photos, the video, the audio, the solid witnesses, and the rest of the evidence? And if the case against Craig in that airport restroom was so compelling, if it was so sleazy, if authorities wanted to send a message to others, why didn’t prosecutors take Craig to trial? Why let him go with a disorderly conduct misdemeanor? Were they doing him a favor? I don’t think so. They conducted a sting operation without any sting. Let me suggest not only couldn’t they make a gross misdemeanor charge stick, they would have lost the disorderly conduct charge, too. Read the statute. But the law is an ass, as they say. This is an issue of morality.

The truth is I don’t know Larry Craig. And it’s possible he is everything some say he is. But they say it without facts. Is that moral? When the news of Craig’s bathroom encounter first broke, I thought Craig must have been involved in a Pee Wee Herman moment — or something. But he didn’t even touch himself, let alone the officer in any sexually overt way. He didn’t expose himself. Hell, he was in a bathroom stall. And neither he nor the officer exchanged a single word about having sex. In fact, Craig never said a word. In the end, what we have here is a shoe touch … or was it a tap? That, along with his hand on the divider between the stalls and something or other was, we are told, code for soliciting sex. It seems to me that the officer should have taken the sting operation at least one more step, no? Wasn’t he a little premature in flashing his badge when he did?

Let’s be honest. I have no idea who Larry Craig is beyond his senatorial record, and neither do any of his outspoken critics. Even if he lives a secret life, we know nothing of it. It remains secret, if it exists.

Today some Republicans pat themselves on the back for their “courageous” stand against liberal charges of hypocrisy as they were early in their denunciation of Craig. Now, these would be the same liberals who show routinely their hypocrisy embracing Bill Clinton (accused of rape), Barney Frank (accused of allowing his home to be used for male prostitution), and the late Gerry Studds (who had sex repeatedly with a seventeen-year-old page). These Republicans fear the “culture of corruption” label the liberals have assigned them and aren’t quite sure how to respond to it. Mostly, they refuse to fire back by highlighting the numerous examples of demonstrable sleaze involving William Jefferson (alleged bribe), Alan Mollohan (alleged self-dealing), John Murtha (earmarks related to his brother), Dianne Feinstein (her husband profiting from military contracts), Hillary Clinton (Norman Hsu, et al), and, of course, the aforementioned Clinton, Frank, and Studds examples.

There is indeed a culture of corruption, and it extends well beyond any single politician. It swirls around big government. It always has and it always will. It has become institutionalized in many ways. And that culture of corruption celebrates clever word games used by unelected judges to exercise power they don’t have as they rewrite the Constitution; it demeans people of faith who speak out against the culture of corruption and for — dare I say — family values; it undermines and seeks to demoralize Americans in uniform as they fight a horrible enemy on the battlefield; it demonizes entrepreneurs and successful enterprises; it uses race, age, religion, gender, and whatever works to balkanize Americans; and so on. This is the real culture of corruption. Let’s call it what it is — modern liberalism. And its impact on our society is far worse than the disorderly-conduct misdemeanor to which Larry Craig pled guilty and for which he has now resigned.

— Mark R. Levin, a former Reagan-administration Department of Justice aide, is president of the Landmark Legal Foundation and nationally syndicated radio-talk-show host.

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National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjVhMzdiZWNmNGNjYTAyMTBmOWEyYjRhZDQ2MTY3OTE=

This article fits my view of things after reading the transcript, which does not shed a load of evidence that would convict. I am also not sure of Craig's innocence, however I see no way of declaring him to be guilty of the original accusations.

I will try to answer this gentlemen’s questions from the presumption of innocence perspective:

Question 1: “Mr. Levin, why would a 62-year-old man who needed to go to the bathroom walk all the way over to another terminal to do this when there were bathrooms right there in his flight terminal? Out of all the many bathrooms at that Minneapolis airport, why would he select this distant men’s room that just happened to be the only one homosexuals used for casual public sex?”

Having spent some time in airports, I have found myself killing time in all sorts of spots. Did the guy have to get on a shuttle bus? Or was he wandering around, looking for a better restaurant, who knows?

Question 2: “Having arrived at that terminal, presumably with a full bladder and/or lower intestine, why would he stand there waiting 13 minutes for a particular stall in that bathroom?”

Who knows? This certainly is no crime, and without the accusation, would be meaningless. How did the officer see the person through that little slit in his stall?

Question 3: “Mr. Levin, do you consider it normal behavior for a man in a public toilet stall to keep placing his foot and hand under the divider into an adjacent occupied stall?”

I certainly avoid that, but it isn't inconceivable in narrow stalls that while turning around with luggage he could have caused an illegal out of stall foot slip.

Heck, I even once dropped a piece of toilet paper and it fell into the next stall's boundary. What is stall etiquette when that happens?

Question 4: "Mr. Levin, how is it possible for a sitting man to have his pant waist at mid-thigh and abduct his leg that far without tearing his pants?”

Give me a diagram. Man, maybe we should put a camera in there to be able to validate this next time. How could the officer be so aware of this gentlemen’s pants anyway? Aren’t those stall dividers pretty low? This one is kind of creepy.

Question 5: “Why would a powerful and well-to-do man who is arrested for something he didn’t do waive his right to legal counsel, confess, pay a fine and submit to conditions of probation?”

Hmm. This is the one that really proves how ridiculous this argument is. If you note, he did not confess to anything lewd, thus isn’t guilty of all the officer suspected. Why can’t you see that? He’s guilty of disorderly conduct, because he pleaded guilty to it. He was being accused by a police officer of something with potentially great political ramifications, something that he recognized could never be disproved. While his attempts to make it go away were not successful in hindsight, do you not see he was screwed from the minute he was accused?

Question 6: “And why would such a man not tell his wife about all this injustice to which he was subjected?”

Unknowable. Perhaps he was embarrassed? Thought he had made it go away until now?

Question 7: “Mr. Levin, would you trust a man who admitted guilt before a judge but subsequently denied his guilt on camera?”

He is denying the implications of the officer’s apparent accusations, and sorry he tried to make it go away the way he did. The lynch mob assumes that guilty of a lesser charge proves guilt of the original accusation. How is this justice or fair?

It appears that all that we need is an accusation and we can presume guilt without any proof. This is the way of America now, to decide guilt or innocence from the comfort of our arm chair.

Levin is 100% on the money.

This is going to come back and bite the GOP in the butt--running a Senator out of town for allegedly playing footsie with a toilet cop. No words exchanged...no physical contact...no real facts. This is absurd. If Anything, Craig should be punsihed for not calling a lawyer as soon as he was arrested.

Notice the lack of outcry from the Dems? They had no leg to stand on. We didn't have any charges of hypocrisy to fight. Just our own impulsive gutlessness. Eventually the Craig affair is going to be evidence of our homophobia...maybe Lindsey Graham will lead the charge and call us "bigots" again. There's a lot of rumors about HIS sexual preferences, you know. And he's got a war chest of $4M and no credible opposition in the primaries.

I don't buy that the defeats we suffered in 06 were due to a "culture of corruption"--I think some of them were deliberately and mendaciously engineered by Rove to give Bush a "congress he could work with" and shove amnesty down the throats of an unwilling American citizenry.

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