We’re Through the Looking Glass

Ironies abound. A pro-values Republican Senator gets bagged in a nice, awkward gay hooker-solicitation scandal, and a prominent, gay Massachusetts Democrat rises to his defense, making the case that, though he’s a hypocrite, the government’s business should be governing, and not getting tied up in people’s private lives. (Note to Republicans, this stuff wouldn’t be killing you so bad if you hadn’t completely betrayed your small government roots.)

Also amusing is Larry Craig’s hamfisted attempts to talk his way out of this. I just got this email from a friend, that sums it up perfectly. “It only gets better with his defense that he just plead guilty to make it go away. Who pleads guilty to soliciting filthy, anonymous restroom sex just for the sake of resolving the matter “expeditiously”? I mean, we’re not talking about telling the cashier to keep the change because you’re in a rush.”

I also happened to catch the alarmingly froglike Gary Bauer on Hardball last night (the transcript isn’t up yet), and if you didn’t see it, you missed out on 10 minutes of TV that would have shaved 10 minutes off your life.

Bauer, a former presidential candidate who loves him some values, shrugged Larrygate off as the product of an overly permissive liberal society, fostered, natch, by Democrats. Chris Matthews, to his credit, nearly laughed him out of the studio, pointing out that gay men were cruising restrooms well before America imploded into a acid cloud of profanity and unnatural sex. I was hoping Matthews would point out that many of these people wouldn’t be reduced to furtively cruising at airports if they weren’t constantly under threat of persecution by people like Bauer, but no go. Maybe the point will be raised next week, when another values pimping Republican gets bagged at an Iowa truckstop, in flagrante delecto with an underaged bald eagle.