Larry Craig and the Moral Collapse of the USA
August 27th, 2007
WARNING: This post is not for children.
SOS Forests is a blog about forests. I occasionally deviate into peripheral issues, however, and this post is one such deviation.
US Senator Larry Craig (R, ID) was arrested June 11 at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, and was charged with “lewd conduct” to which he pled guilty and paid more than $500 in fines and fees. He was then released on his own recognizance, but was given a year of probation.
The lewd conduct was the solicitation of sex in the Men’s Room to an undercover policeman conducting a sting operation, allegedly because of complaints about such goings on at the airport.
The story, now stories plural, are available in much greater detail at the Idaho Statesman.Com (here):
The original Idaho Statesman report has been modified by adding some self-defense by Craig, that he was innocent, and only pled guilty by mistake, that he didn’t consult with his attorney, and just wanted to get out of there, to do some of his important Senator-type business, which the people of the Great State of Idaho, and indeed the Entire Nation, look to him for.
I myself was sort of hoping that Larry Craig might be someone who could help stop the crisis of forest destruction. His state, after all, has been fried this summer by dozens of megafires. I linked to reports of his trip to Ketchum last weekend during the blowup of the Castle Rock Fire, which is not quite over yet. I thought he might have the common sense intelligence and moral backbone to lead the call for desperately needed changes in our national fire and forest management policies.
Now I think that common sense and decency are lacking in Larry Craig. I wish to wash this site of him. And I will not mention him again here at SOSF, not without well-stated conditionals anyway.
The question of moral values is important to saving our forests. Saving forests from destruction is a moral act. Without morality, forests cannot be saved; indeed, it is the moral collapse of our society that is at the root of our crisis of forest destruction.
Our society began its moral collapse in the 1960’s, during our Cultural Revolution. I was there, and those were heady times. The old forms and modalities were cast aside, freedom of thought and action reigned, and the future looked bright and exciting.
But without the old forms, especially traditional moral values, the future, now the now, has proved to be dark and depressing.
Larry Craig is just one among many elected leaders who harbor secret depravities, although he now is in that select group of folks who have been outed. Clinton is the role model nationally, and Goldschmidt here in Oregon, but the disease runs deep and sometimes I think they are all infected.
The Moral Collapse of America is not exclusive to our elected leaders. It is everywhere. TV is a massive explosion of decay and rot directly into the hypnotized brains of the Masses. The Media, the Internet, public schools, the malls, the theaters, the streets, are filled with people who have no moral base, no compass, no conscious, no sense of right and wrong, or at least, no strong desire to do right and not do wrong.
Instead the desire is to feed desire, and that beast is never satisfied.
Religions are little or no help. Some religions espouse wars of terror, some slavery, some inquisitions. Some provide rule books, which are somewhat helpful. But the rule books are filled with umpires and penalty boxes, and penalties for rules that make no sense, rules which stultify people, and actually stunt their moral growth. And the umpires often violate the rule books anyhow, because they lack the moral conviction of their own rules.
Morality is based on relationship, the act of connecting with something outside oneself, and in particular, connecting with God. Sorry, but that’s how it is. The root of human morality is in personal relationships with the Higher Power.
That’s the answer. Now that you’ve got it, you don’t need anything else but to do it.
If you want to. It’s your choice. The choice of our society in general for the last forty years has been to bugger all that and let’s go get high, or rich, or thrilled, or violent, or satisfied in any number of unsatisfying ways. I claim no special innocence in those respects. The pull of the tides is strong. I am only human. Larry is only human. We all are only human.
But if we want to save our forests, we are going to have to do better at the basic morality issue. I am going to have to do better, and so are you. The crisis demands it. Common sense and decency are the required implements of forest salvation. They are required for saving anything worthwhile, not just forests.
The best way to get that common sense and decency stuff is to talk to God about it, and ask Him to lay some on you. He will, too, because that’s the kind of God He is.
August 27th, 2007 at 8:13 pm
Kempthorne? Ritter? Gulp.
What a maroon. He’s done.
August 27th, 2007 at 8:51 pm
Time to stick the fork in Larry. But there is a larger lesson here, one that I hope does not get lost in the circus. It’s the one about right and wrong, good and evil, truth and lie, beauty and ugliness, and how that lesson applies to all of us, not just Larry.
August 27th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
And yet another meta question: how do we go about governing ourselves? Which defective boss replaces the old defective boss?
While our forests, homes, and landscapes are burning, while deadly predators are placed in our yards, while our jobs are going up in smoke, while our streams boil, while our skies are filled with ash and soot, and the fear of fire has driven thousands from their homes? How shall we govern or be governed in the wastelands of the future?
Or can we rise to the occasion and take back our land, our forests, our legacies, from the Bosses of Destruction?
August 27th, 2007 at 9:32 pm
Well, if Craig were a Democrat he would have proudly admitted that he has sex with men in airport toilets and got elected on a platform of requiring more capacious and accommodating stalls.
But not from Idaho. Craig is toast. His hard won power and influence spent on the enticing prospect of a brief episode of public buggery. What an idiot.
People have been talking for months about his unusual sexual proclivities. He thought he could plead guilty and keep all this quiet? I wouldn’t be surprised if he was specifically targeted. This guy has a wife and three kids. What a slug. He pleads guilty and now says he was innocent and should have had a lawyer. He’d like to take it all back.
Well, Senator, how about this? Maybe the citizens of Idaho would like to take it all back. The elections, the salaries, the benefits, the earmarks, the boondoggles and the retirement plan. All of it. They didn’t vote for the guy playing footsie with the cop (and, oh, what an attractive and clean cut young fellow he was, too) while little boys traveling with their mommies coming in to take a leak with the “men” folk were left to wonder just what being a grownup is all about anyway.
They’d like it all back. Pronto.
August 27th, 2007 at 10:08 pm
Don’t look back, Senator Craig, ’cause the Democrat Hypocrite Patrol is clicking its teeth at your heels. Maybe you oughta have Barney Frank packing water for you. It is OK to proposition for same sex dalliances, but only if you are a Democrat. You had to know that!
They are still naming Federal buildings in Massachusetts after the late Rep. Gerry Studds, who had his way with male pages in the Capitol elevators. He had the Democrat Diversity Pass. The DDP. A Mormon state conservative Republican may never possess a DDP. The world does not work that way. You had just better join Michael Vick on the dais and dump your slurry of contrition and shame, and be done with it. Go find a gay beach and enjoy that part of your pension your wife won’t get.
Oh and by the way, thanks for trading rural folks hopes of a better life for a quickie you did not get in the airport pisser. Nobody bought your sub-prime career mortgage, but it is now being called because you will not be able to make the interest payments and we now know what you think about principles. It appears that only thing you can count on from the conservative side is the same kind of disappointment you get from the liberal side, only from the libs you knew you would be disappointed.
You know Craig is off to some shame cave, but Barney and Gerry and the other pretentions of diversity from the Left get a free pass to share their digs with male prostitutes, chase underage boys, all with no consequence. I would hope that Craig would be a guy who would put in with the Log Cabin Republicans, and we could be better for it. But that’s not in the cards. Now the “outers” will give us a blow by blow account of his downfall. He is Leno fodder tonight. Dave will do the sophisticated NY snide cut. What a day. Gonzales throws in the towel, Vick’s contrition, Craig’s toilet tiff, Joey wins a game at Atlanta, and nobody knows if a fallen wind turbine leaves a steel footprint or a just a carbon turd on the Steppe, along with the life it took.
The windy wind winders stated to the Oregonian that wind turbines kill fewer birds than cats. Boy, oh howdy, does that bring comfort. Cats kill over a billion birds a year just in North America!!! So how many less than a billion will wind turbines kill? We now know they can kill people.
I stopped by St. Vincent’s and Goodwill looking for a cheerleader outfit, but didn’t find one in three x huge. I wanted to go find Marvel’s house in Sun Valley and stand in front of it and cheer for the Castle Rock fire. Just the natural part, mind you. In the name of diversity. Biological, theological, scatalogical diversity. Burn some symbolic cheat grass. Praise Pele. All the normal stuff.
But instead I am going to bed, in the hope that tomorrow is just a tad better than today.
August 28th, 2007 at 11:40 am
For an excellent review of wind turbine problems and the recent fatal accident in Oregon, see the Rogue Pundit *Wind Turbine Problems (Updated)* here:
http://roguepundit.typepad.com/roguepundit/2007/08/wind-turbine-pr.html
“…One man was killed and another injured Saturday after a wind turbine collapsed in Sherman County.
Deputy Shull with the Sherman County Sheriff’s office said the two men involved were working on a non-operational turbine at the Klondike Wind Farms east of Wasco Oregon.
Officials said one worker who was at the top of the turbine was killed when it buckled. A second man had to be rescued from the barrel of the collapsed structure. He was taken to an area hospital where his condition was unknown.
There are two Klondike wind farms and a third under construction. They all belong to PPM energy, which is owned by ScottishPower.
It was a Siemens turbine at Klondike III, which is still under construction [that collapsed]…” — from the Rogue Pundit
August 28th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
As a Republican state senator in Montana and as a human being, I am offended by Senator Craig’s existence. Why oh why are most of the perverts that get caught Republicans? Are there more of them or are they just stupid? The thought of a US Senator chasing love in all the wrong places makes me think longingly of the Ayotollahs in Iran. They would just kill the turkey.
August 29th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
Mike: I read the Rogue Pundit’s report on the Siemens wind turbine problems. That was a prescient story.[Indubitably - M]
So if you are a mega-conglomerate like Siemens, do you get a free pass on being a corporate greed monger if you are making faulty hardware to secure the Green Dream? Is the Sales Division selling a product the Engineering Division can’t design right, but that the Production Division is not going to quit making?
I see the problem is the old Interstate System bridge and overpass height issue. Engineering can only make the turbine/windmill bases as large as the highway system will allow to be carried on the lowest of lowbed trailers. And customers want taller windmills with longer blades and bigger electrical outputs. So we get too tall, too skinny, matchstick windmills that tip over. Sales and Customers pushing Engineering through an extruder.
That is the limit on home designs and construction: trusses are made according to the maximum that a truck can pack down the highway and get under the overpasses. So we get a lot of big box houses with little truss roofs. No large diameter timber so ranch homes essentially can no longer be built with any sort of economy. They can’t cut the joists it takes to make the spans, and the truss outfits can’t get the trusses needed hauled. So it has to be the two piece trusses, without the open beam ceiling. Just like the wind turbines can only be so tall because they can’t haul a wider base on the highway.
Now you have to wonder how many will fall over in the next couple of years. How much blood to be spilled to make green electricity.
August 29th, 2007 at 7:28 pm
Bear Bait — all that reminds me of a story, with a moral.
The Roman Empire once contained most of the known world. The Caesars kept the Empire together with Roman roads, the kind their armies traveled upon. The army generals traveled by chariot, and the Roman roads would get rutted by the chariot wheels.
So in one of the first known major bureaucratic decisions in history, the Romans decreed that all chariots would have the same wheelbase, 4 feet 8 inches, or roughly the width of a horse’s ass. All the chariots fit the ruts, and broken axles were less frequent.
The English kept that standard on their horse-drawn carriages, for the same reason. And when they built the first railroads nearly two thousand years later, they set the track width at 4 feet 8 inches. That fit their roads and bridges. This distance became, and still is, the standard railroad track width in America.
In the 1990’s Morton-Thiokol Inc. in Utah landed the contract to build the booster rockets that power the space shuttle. Those rockets, built in sections, had to pass through tunnels in the Rockies to get to Florida and Cape Kennedy/Canaveral (where NASA launches the space shuttle).
Those are railroad tunnels. They are just big enough to let a railroad train through, a railroad train with a wheelbase of 4 feet 8 inches. The rockets could not be any bigger in diameter than the tunnels, right?
Bottom line? The most advanced transportation system ever created, the space shuttle, is designed and built to certain limiting specs, i.e. the width of a horse’s ass.
And the moral? Our lives are run by horse’s asses, have been since the days of the Roman Empire, and there is sadly nothing that you or I can do about it.
August 31st, 2007 at 9:27 am
Gerry Studds didn’t “have his way” with male pages in elevators. He had a consenting relationship behind closed doors with a male page. Of course it’s inappropriate to have a relationship with a subordinate, but I hardly think it’s equal to soliciting sex in a public bathroom. If you’re being level-headed, you know that’s true.
August 31st, 2007 at 9:32 am
wow, I just read Senator Dave Lewis’ comment. Recommending death for the queers. I bet that’ll be big news…
August 31st, 2007 at 10:20 am
James, I suspected someone like you was lurking. Let me help you to understand. The Craig issue is not sexual preference, the issue is trust.
Larry violated the trust that was placed in him. He was sent to Washington DC to protect and defend Idaho, and to help save Idaho from ruin. He failed, especially in regard to protecting, maintaining, and perpetuating Idaho’s forests, but people were willing to forgive him in that, because he made some token effort. What Idahoans are unwilling to forgive are the violations of trust.
Soliciting sex in airport bathrooms is not appropriate behavior for a US Senator. Nor is the solicitation of sex from pages by a powerful Congressman appropriate behavior. Nor is the solicitation of sex from an intern by a US President appropriate behavior.
In all cases mentioned, the sex acts themselves are somewhat secondary to the inappropriate exercise of power. We do not elevate people to power in this country so that they might abuse that power, by debasing or using for pleasure underlings, passersby, bathroom visitors, pages, interns, or anyone.
We do not elevate them to power so that they they might accumulate graft, or bribes, or political payoffs, either.
We elevate our elected and appointed officials to protect and defend us from overweaning power: from the abuse of our individual rights, from the destruction of our landscapes, from the destruction of our communities.
That is the trust emplaced. When violated, the whole game is over. The Craig case is not about homosexuality. It is about violation of trust.
August 31st, 2007 at 10:43 am
And James, Dave Lewis, a very honorable man, did not recommend “death for queers” (your phraseology).
His statement was obviously exaggerated, but I am sure he meant only to display his rage at Craig’s betrayal of his word and the trust placed in him. That betrayal is tantamount to treason, because Craig is an elected representative in a democracy.
In dictatorships like Iran, the punishment for treason is swift and sure. In democracies like ours, Craig will not be punished at all. He will retain his salary and pension at the taxpayers’ expense. His new ineffectualness will punish the people of Idaho, not Larry.
At it will punish our forests. Or not… Larry has been ineffectual in that regard for quite some time.
What I do not understand, James, is how the radical queer Left can perpetrate giant scare stories about queers in mortal danger, when they aren’t, and ignore the mortal peril our forests are so obviously in. Why is it that you are all exercised about a myth, and so indifferent to reality?
What did forests ever do to you that you now wish for their extinction? What is the official queer position on megafires destroying America’s priceless, heritage forests?
August 31st, 2007 at 3:54 pm
Really James, I think we all get the queer position. You think you should be allowed, praised, and even subsidized for having strange sex in public bathrooms. You want to do it in the road with anything and everything. We catch that about you queers. Okay? No need to belabor it, because we get your point-of-view.
My question to you, and the general discussion on this blog, has to do with forests though, not queers. Sorry if that boors you, but that’s how it is. So please, if you want to participate here, let us in on this one of your little secrets: what do queers think about forests? Do you all want them burned to the ground in holocausts, or do queers prefer responsible forest stewardship? Inquiring minds wish to know.
Or are queers indifferent to forests, burned or unburned? That would also be useful information, to those of us engaged in saving forests.
September 3rd, 2007 at 9:35 am
As an Idaho native, the best thing for that state is Craig going down. He and his good buddy Conrad Burns from Montana getting out of there are the best things that could have happened for these two timber states. Risch would make a much better and pro-active leader than Craig. Wildlife and timber issues will be much better served by Risch.