There’s a tremendous humour potential to this, with absurdities climbing on top of absurdities, but I actually feel very sorry for Craig, even though the entire trainwreck was his fault.
I mean, surely we’ve all had a situation where you’re hiding a secret, and you really, really don’t want someone to find out, and when you think it might be out you panic and have that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach and rush around trying to hide it again? I dunno, maybe the world is full of people who have lived perfectly honest, secret-free lives, but I don’t think so.
Well, I’ve tried to hide some pretty big things from people, and it’s a really awful feeling and you learn a lot about regret and shame. I didn’t mention to my parents that I’d dropped out of university my first go through, and held that back for months, and it felt really awful and even though things turned out fine in the end and I went back, I still remember how bad that felt, how scared I was, and I regret to this day that I had not stopped that deception before it began and handled it differently.
Larry Craig’s secret is about a HUNDRED times bigger than anything I, or most people, have had to hide, at least to him. It was so shameful that I suspect he even kind of hid it from himself, engaging in a lifetime doublethink where he was trolling for gay sex and at the same time pretending he was a gay-hating, straight-arrow Republican Man <TM>. He’s constructed an entire, very public, life around the lie that he is not what he is, and now his life is flying apart, and his kids are giving him the hairy eyeball (and you know they are no matter what they say in public) and his wife’s smile is looking a little less sincere, and his career appears to be hopelessly doomed. All this because of something that he never had any say in and couldn’t control and was probably raised from childhood to think was terrible and awful. He has probably torn himself apart over being gay since he was nine years old.
Before anyone goes off on me, no, I don’t think it SHOULD be shameful to be gay. I don’t agree with an ounce of Larry Craig’s politics. I’d vote for the flamingest queen in the Castro district before I voted for Larry Craig. He is 100% responsible for everything that’s happened and he has handled it almost as badly as I can possibly imagine. Using money from he campaign fund to defend himself is tantamount to theft, assuming it’s not his personal money.
But he’s still a human being who was dealt a tough hand and played is badly and he’s in an awful spot, and even as I admit it’s his fault, I feel really sorry for him.