Thursday, August 30th, 2007...6:34 am
Wait, Let’s Give This Man the Benefit of the Doubt
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I was thinking about Larry Craig’s rationale: that a guilty plea is not an admission of guilt. Somehow he was intimidated or nervous and felt he had to plead guilty.
You know, he might have a point there. He and his colleagues have spent so much of the past few years evicerating the rights of criminal defendants, he may have not even realized that he still had due process.
4 Comments
August 30th, 2007 at 7:29 am
Larry Craig is politically dead because he’s a liar, not because he’s likely gay. Many Republicans calling for his head seem more concerned about his likely gayness, not his lying.
September 1st, 2007 at 11:58 pm
Larry Craig gambled and lost. He gambled that a guilty plea on a misdemeanor charge would fly under the radar, and he was right — but only for a couple of months.
From what I have heard and read of the tapes and circumstances surrounding the arrest, it looks to me like soon-to-be-ex Sen. Craig could have beaten this charge in court. With the right attorney, he could’ve raised some reasonable doubts and re-framed the issue on entrapment, if he had only been willing to defend himself with the same vigor as he did this past week.
If he was not gay, never had been gay, and was tired of the rumors, why did he wimp out and plead guilty? Did he simply not want to go through the wringer of 24/7 news coverage, jokes, and more rumors? Probably. Wanting to shield his family from embarrassment is a reasonable excuse, but surely Craig didn’t expect to keep a lid on this forever. He should’ve fought it head-on the first time. As an elected official, Craig should know that a time will come for a principled stand. That time came and went, and it is simply befuddling to see how he rolled over so easily.
Sorry, Senator. You don’t get a do-over. If you truly believed you were framed, you should’ve pleaded not guilty and worked it out in the system. Who knows, you may have even taught us all a little something about presumption of innocence instead of leaving us with an assumption of guilt. You’re getting exactly what you deserve. Politicians doth not live by spin doctoring alone.
September 5th, 2007 at 6:43 am
Apparently he’s now considering not retiring after all. Does this make him a “flip-flopper”.
September 5th, 2007 at 8:17 pm
Oh, no, not at all. This indicates that he isn’t a rigid ideologue. Give it enough time, the beltway intelligencia will be giving him credit for this one.
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