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September 05, 2007

Indecisiveness Born of Self-Delusion and Partisanship

I’ve never seen anyone in public life so completely conflicted and undecided in my life as Sen. Larry Craig. First, he claims he is straight after being caught trying to pick up an undercover cop for gay bathroom sex. Then he foregoes legal counsel and pleads guilty, but later says he wasn’t guilty and hires a lawyer to try to undo his plea. Next, when the story goes public, he resigns, and now he is having second thoughts about that, too, saying through his spokesman that resignation is “not such a foregone conclusion anymore.”

Best case scenario for Sen. Craig is he really is innocent and has simply displayed a horrendous lack of sound judgment ever since, in which case he needs to be out of the Senate. Worst case scenario, and more likely, is that he is sexually conflicted, that he risked his reputation as a U.S. Senator to have “nasty, bad, naughty boy” sex with a stranger in a public restroom, thereby embarrassing his entire state and country, that he has lived a lie his entire adult life to the point where he compulsively lies with ease now, that he is so addicted to the power of his office that he is blind to the disgrace he has brought to this country and cannot let it go, and on top of it all, he has a horrendous lack of sound judgment.

Nevertheless, he is a Republican with a good conservative voting record. If any legal decision gives him the slightest bit of wiggle room, he will claim to have been exonerated and the Republican voters will forget all about the facts of his case, chalking it all up to a dirty Democratic scheme to take down a good Republican. And he may well even fool himself into believing it. Such things happen all the time.

A man who lies easily to others often lies to himself, pushing his knowledge of his own bad deeds back down in the dark corners where it can be ignored by his conscious mind. When someone acknowledges to himself that he is a dirty, crooked liar, others can smell it. But when he actually consciously overlooks his own wrongdoing, like someone learning to ignore an ache or pain to get through his daily life, and he convinces himself on that day-to-day operating plane that he actually is a good person, the stench becomes so masked it is hard for others to readily discern, making them easier to victimize.

So I feel for his wife and his children, who really have no palatable choice but to believe and love him, at the same time that I am disgusted with his partisan supporters, whose own naiveté is such that they allow this sort of horrendous “leadership” to continue to undermine what is good for the country.

Posted by Becky at September 5, 2007 09:56 AM