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."