Falling for the Spin

While two of Craig's kids gave a painful interview to "GMA" yesterday in which they said of course their dad is not gay, Arianna breaks from the liberal mockery of the Idaho senator:

"Given that chilling assessment, isn't it the height of madness to use America's finite law enforcement resources to seek out and arrest people for tapping the foot of a cute undercover officer in a restroom?

"Don't get me wrong, I'm not wild about walking into a public restroom and seeing a couple using the a stall for something other than, as Sgt. Dave Karsnia, the arresting officer in the Craig case put it, 'its intended use.'

"But that is not what Larry Craig did. If he had, someone in the restroom could have done what most people do when they see a law being broken: Go get a cop.

"And as it happens, since Craig was arrested in an airport, presumably there were plenty of law enforcement officers nearby looking for, you know, real threats -- like explosives or folks on a Watch List. Assuming, that is, they weren't all hunkered down in other bathrooms across the airport, protecting the public against people who might be thinking about having sex.

"Let me be clear: I'm no fan of Larry Craig. Indeed, I disagree with almost everything he stands for. And I'd much rather he not be in the United States Senate. But I'd also rather have had his exit be the result of his constituents voting on his ideas and policies, instead of a ridiculous sting operation in an airport bathroom."

Arianna, it should be noted, had been married to former congressman Michael Huffington, who turned out to be gay.

Ann Althouse thinks Arianna has it backwards:

"So -- in Arianna's world -- if you have an airport bathroom that's become a notorious place for gay sex, you don't need to station an undercover cop inside to catch anybody and deter the behavior, you can just hang back and wait for the bathroom-goers to see the sexual beharior and to do what 'most people do.' These busy travelers will officiously run around the airport looking for a cop. That doesn't sound to me like the way 'most people' react to sleazy quality-of-life crimes. I think most people would be disgusted, immediately leave the bathroom and plan to avoid that bathroom -- and maybe that airport -- in the future . . .

"I'm not an economist, but it seems to me that the sting is cost effective. One police officer, carrying out very few arrests, ruins the reputation of this bathroom as a place for sex encounters."

Andrew Sullivan, just back from vacation, has more sympathy than you might expect for a proponent and a practitioner of gay marriage:

"While it is possible to note (and rightly so) the hypocrisy of Craig, and while it is sensible to believe that a sitting senator should not be putting himself in such compromising positions, the large implications of an almost laughably petty misdemeanor are revealing of problems deeper than one man's personal tragedy. One problem is the cruelty of public discourse. Yes, Craig is a public figure, but he is also a human being, and a gay human being, and I feel for him, for the lies he has told himself and others, for the psychic pain that led him to this place, and for the obvious lack of self-control that his profoundly split identity entailed. I don't think he even knows he's gay.