I could not care less if Larry Craig is gay or bisexual. And there is a real tragedy in the fact that his career is ending — when you really cut to the chase — because he’s gay. The fact of his public hypocrisy doesn’t diminish the tragic dimension of this. It just shoots it through with a lot of irony when you consider that he is probably as committed as anyone to rejecting this defense on his own behalf. As Matt Yglesias suggested a couple days ago, by continuing to deny his sexuality at this stage he moves from the tragic to the ridiculous, though those two states are much more often mixed than we probably realize or want to believe.
All that said, I can only imagine the veritable muck nirvana that must have gone on behind the scenes into the last 48 hours of turnabouts. What did Craig need to put on the table to get his colleagues and his Minority Leader to acquiesce in his return? And what did they put on the table to make him pack it in again?
And to paraphrase the horror movie genre, is Craig really gone even now or has he merely entered the shadowy ranks of the unresigned, destined to walk the earth for eternity tormenting his party?
