Thursday, September 06, 2007

No Room In This Week's Column for the Larry Craig Jokes

With Sen. Craig issuing ambiguous statements about whether he actually will resign at the end of the month, I wanted to announce (but didn't have room in this coming Sunday's column) that I fully expect, by September 30, that I will end my term of making Larry Craig jokes. I and everybody on my staff (ha!) is busy preparing for the comedic transition (do we get to bring back Alberto Gonzales jokes?). I intend to resign myself to bathroom humor no longer being politically salient.

But like the Idaho senator, there’s a bit of ambiguity in my declaration. Are we really resigning, or is there some (ahem) wiggle room in our less-than-Shermaneque declarations?

So I get to wonder if Sen. Craig is auditioning to play Howard Brackett -- that’s the conflicted schoolteacher played by Kevin Kline -- in a senatorial remake of 1997’s In & Out. As Brackett’s students said of him, you also can say of Craig: "He’s smart and well dressed and very clean. It doesn’t look good."

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