Posted on 09/04/2007 7:48:46 PM PDT by RightOnTheLeftCoast
Ben Stein: Gestapo Tactics Got Larry Craig
Tuesday, September 4, 2007 7:39 PM
Former Sen. Larry Craig didn't do anything illegal and was railroaded with "Gestapo tactics," says actor and commentator Ben Stein.
Appearing recently on Your World With Neil Cavuto program, Stein remarked: "I don't like the idea that people are sitting in the next stall from you at a public bathroom listening to whether or not you tap your foot. This is, as I said, Gestapo tactics. Gestapo, Gestapo, Gestapo. It's not America."
Stein says Craig, who was arrested June 11 by Minneapolis police and pled guilty to a charge of disorderly conduct, is a victim of "pure police entrapment and thuggery."
"The police have real work to do at the airport," Stein says. "It's an airport, hello. There are security problems at airports. Al-qaida: Are you listening? Our security people are entrapping perfectly honest U.S. senators in lavatory stalls instead of looking for you terrorists."
Stein charges that police intimidated Craig into pleading guilty to disorderly conduct after he was arrested for tapping his foot in a bathroom stall at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport.
Police say foot tapping is a common overture used to signal interest in a sexual encounter. Minneapolis police had reportedly made several arrests in recent months for lewd conduct in restrooms at the airport.
"A policeman drags him off, or verbally drags him off, starts browbeating him, essentially threatens he's going to ruin his career if the guy doesn't plead guilty right away," Stein tells Cavuto. "This is Gestapo tactics in Minneapolis-St. Paul. It's not nice."
Stein adds that it was wrong for GOP stalwarts to join the drumbeat for Craig's resignation: "This is some way to treat the people who have been loyal members of your party for many years. What did he do wrong? Suppose he was soliciting for gay sex. Gay sex is not illegal in the United States, the Supreme Court has said that. If it were illegal, it would be a different story. It's not illegal. He didn't do anything illegal, they're just bludgeoning him into a confession."
The Craig scandal points out a fundamental question about the balance of political power, according to Stein.
"On trumped up charges, they bring down the legislator and change the balance of power within the United States generally," he says. "This is a really serious case of police overreaching and the victim here is Larry Craig and the Constitution of the United States."
Craig has represented Idaho in Congress for over a quarter of a century and was up for re-election next year.
The question I have though is why did Craig sign the guilty confession so much later if he had time to consider the consequences of signing the confession?
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Simple; because he read the statute he was charged under and saw that it was wide open to interpretation, almost anything could fall under it... he had a sting operation wherein the only evidence that the judge would hear is blah blah blah solicit ,, blah blah blah solicit... from the cop and he would get a guilty anyway.. personally I feel he deserved the charge only if he made advances to the cop AFTER the cop gave any kind of refusal or pushback to him , then he would be a nuisance but I see nothing where the cop signaled “not interested” or even said something like “occupied!” when he looked into the stall..
BTTT
Your post gives me the chance to explain once again the peculiar problem with society and gay people.
When we set up restrooms, the idea was to segregate them so that the people in them would not be physically attracted, or a danger to, other people in those bathrooms.
And just like sleeping arrangements on a camping trip, there is no easy way to accomplish this when you add gay people.
If you have straight men, you can put them all together in a bathroom, and there will be no attraction.
But if you add a single gay man, that man will have the possibility of attraction to the straight men.
Making the bathroom a “gay” bathroom doesn’t help — now you have an entire bathroom for people who could be attracted to one another.
But, just as with heterosexuals, gay people aren’t naturally attracted to all other gay people, or interested in sex with just any other guy. A gay man could just as easily suffer from unwanted attention from another man as a straight woman.
It’s like suggesting you could make a “gay” scout troop. It wouldn’t work, because you’d send your kid and they’d be bunked with another child who might want to have sex with them. The point of same-sex camping was to eliminate the danger that the kids would be having sex.
When you do a co-ed campout, you are careful to put the boys together, and the girls together. As soon as you have gays involved, they have to be segregated and given their own tent.
Now, it is true that you could put a gay boy and a lesbian girl together. But as soon as you throw a 3rd person into the mix, there’s going to be attraction.
Tell Craig to stop flirting with men in bathroom stalls. Get a room.
I’m tired of those attacking Romney for this. Romney had a volunteer on his campaign, who PLED GUILTY to disorderly conduct in the bathroom.
It’s not like he was throwing a friend out of his house because the guy picked his nose. A campaign position is not for the person holding the position, it’s for the candidate. There is NOTHING helpful to a candidate to have person who has become notorious on their staff.
Staff get removed for much less than this. They get removed for making one improper remark, making one bad comment on a web page, or sometimes even simply for having the wrong companions.
Mitt correctly called the behavior Craig pled guilty to as abhorent. He had no way to know that Craig would later claim he was coerced into a guilty plea and actually did nothing — and there’s no value in Mitt coming out NOW and retracting his statement.
Yes, you should have the right to not be propositioned by hookers.
But what if they were just girls who wanted to have sex? Should you be free from having girls ask you to have sex for free? Should that be a crime?
Where the activity can occur dictates if it is a crime or not.
A woman should have the right to go into the ladies room and not be followed by a man who is intent on pursuing her.
Would you not consider that 'lewd behaviour'
Yes, but that’s children, which would be pedophilia. It would be illegal for a man to have sex with the child, in ANY circumstance.
Here there were two consenting adults. Remember, the other man was pretending he wanted to have sex, in order to encourage Craig to continue to send “signals”.
I’m not saying he was actively SENDING signals, just that the police officer did NONE of the things a normal man would do to prevent “unwanted” attention, like telling the perv to stop looking in his stall, or saying what the heck when the shoe came in his stall, or moving his foot AWAY from the foot.
Hey, the officer wasn’t even using the bathroom. There were no grunts, flushes,or any sign the officer was reading a paper, or a book, or doing ANYTHING in the stall other than waiting for gay people.
In other words, if a police officer had caught the police officer in that stall, he might have arrested HIM for trolling for gay sex.
I happen to oppose laws making harmless activity illegal simply because it’s “too hard” to catch people in actual illegal activity”.
For example, I should be allowed to grow pot in my back yard. The plant is harmless, it’s something found in nature, and why should I be prohibited from growing something God put on this earth? But we make it a crime because otherwise we can’t stop people from smoking the stuff in their house later.
Drinking laws are largely the same. We ban 20-year-olds from buying a beer because we are afraid they will give beer to 17-year-olds, who will then drive, which WOULD be a dangerous thing.
Laws which target legal, non-harmful activity simply because those activities could lead to illegal activity cheapen the law and lower our respect for following the rule of law.
I almost want to go to a bathroom and tap my feet, just because I should have the freedom to do so.
Wow. I don’t remember this much sympathy when George Michael got busted the same way.
He’s absolutely right.
If you want to know how stupid Larry Craig appears to be, there’s a tape now that is supposedly Larry Craig leaving a message for his lawyer on an answering machine, only he DIALED THE WRONG NUMBER.
Pee Wee Herman was run up the pole because he was a children’s entertainer, who was caught in a porn movie masturbating.
Half the kid’s father’s might have been in that room with him, but NONE of them would want a man who would do that to be teaching morals to their kids on TV.
In the same manner, Larry Craig has to not run for re-election because his actions were stupid, even if it turns out he isn’t gay and wasn’t soliciting. And he has to resign for the good of his party, so they can get the story out of the papers and get a replacement in office who can win next year.
We can’t afford to have to spend money on Idaho.
But that is all separate from whether he should have been detained, arrested, or had to plead guilty.
That's a stunning turn of events. Apparently Larry Craig is not a learned man or a careful man, but rather a reckless idiot.
Well..he’s pro shamnesty which is why it pains me. But he broke no law. I’d like to see him out of office but for the right reasons.
You mean his “preference” that the LAW be followed? That only people who actually break laws should be arrested? I think he should do that in full public view.
This is the part that is most disturbing. The effort to threaten and intimidate Larry Craig into a guilty plea, are disgusting. Such tactics are an appalling abuse of power.
As I said, bringing in the children is a stretch. The cast of characters in this case does not include any children. And yes, children should be carefully supervised, especially in public. The HHH airport is huge and unsupervised children might slip and fall in the Muslim foot baths in the airport bathrooms, there.
Well your statement was pretty shallow and your analogy pretty lame and beside the point::
to wit: “It’s like saying that violent crime is uncontrolled because there are cops whose primary job
it is to ticket violators of the speed limit.”
-—We’re in an AIRPORT in this example, dude, which is admittedly a “transportation venue” but that’s where the comparison ends.
Pathetic trolling for anonymous gay sex, which has been
a feature of gay “culture” in most Western societies since forever, is not in any way comparable to “violent crime” thought it ironically is a little closer to violating the speed limit.The fact that you would join the two in one
application shows where your head is at. Neither airports nor our highways are the most common venues for violent crime, though only one with huge blinders on could miss the connection that the worst attack in our history was carried out from four airports at once. The presence of a hapless “vice cop” sitting and waiting for signs that someone, anyone is propositioning strangers for some sexual contact in a public restroom presupposes that if he weren’t there, this restroom like thousands of others would become PERVERSION CENTRAL in no time, with grunting and heaving behind the locked doors of every stall.
And who knows, if we see it or hear it while we’re taking a leak, it could rub off on us!!! OH! THE HORROR!!!! Absurd, but you can conjure those images in your heated mind if you want to.I, like you and the rest of us, have been no doubt in THOUSANDS of restrooms in every possible location, including, probably bars frequiented by gays, and NEVER have I seen ANY sign of “Gay Sex” occurring there. These conceits of yours are really not far at all from the idiot notion that homosexuality has to be challenged as something that doesn’t “deserve to exist”, sort of like , well, you know, the state of Israel.
Yean , yeah, I know, you’re enlightened enough to acknowledge that homosexuality DOES deserve to exist, it just should be carried out in the privacy of one’s home.
Right,the privacy of one’s home, since the case in point here is a US Senator, who is obviously a CLOSETED GAY WHO IS MARRIED, because on the Republican side, that is apparently the way it’s done. Don’t confuse your loathing for the aggressive Gay Agenda, which we all hate, with THIS, merely because the common denominator is “gayness” or “gay behavior”; ONCE MORE, this is a CLOSETED GAY WHO IS MARRIED, and who needs to save face, in the same way that Bill Clinton (another liar) needed to save face as heterosexual adulterer. As I remember vividly from years ago, when the Dems managed to successfully spin the Clinton crimes in the public mind, as only being “about sex”, they inadvertently gave both Clintons more unearned sympathy than any two people in AMerican Political Life, and THAT legacy stays with us to this day.
And ENOUGH ALREADY of the idiotic “pride” Republicans take in “cleaning up their own mess” with “hypocrites” like Larry Craig. All it does is makes them look like the homophobes the Dems delight in painting them as.
The pathetic enterprises of entrapment are not deserving of a society that pretends to be adult.
I rest my case.
For the time being at least. I have to go out and exceed the speed limit. thereby giving the municipality next door some much needed “revenue”.
“Scary sentiment. So, we’re into mob rule now?”
Not at all but we need to get rid of tyranny by the minority.
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