Craig prepares to leave Washington

Sen. Larry Craig’s oldest adopted son said the family believed the Idaho Republican when he said he had been unfairly arrested for soliciting gay sex in a Minneapolis airport restroom. Craig announced Saturday that he would resign over the scandal, but vowed to clear his name.

In an era when terrorists could strike on American soil at any moment, said Arianna Huffington in The Huffington Post, “isn't it the height of madness to use America's finite law enforcement resources to seek out and arrest people for tapping the foot of a cute undercover officer in a restroom?” The cop who arrested Craig should have been somewhere else in the airport looking for “explosives or someone on a Watch List.”

Or perhaps the cop could have been fighting crime on the streets of Minneapolis, said Jon Carroll in the San Francisco Chronicle. “It must be a lousy job, sitting in a men's room stall for hours at a time, waiting for a sleekly shod foot to inch its way across the tiles, waiting for an elegant hand to slip under the partition and do the "Shall We Engage in Lewd Acts?" finger dance.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Craig insists he only pleaded guilty to make the “nasty” incident “go away,” said Kathleen Parker in The Chicago Tribune. But even if you grant him the benefit of the doubt, it’s clear that the Republican Party is “wandering in the wilderness of moral confusion.” Before Craig, Sen. David Vitter’s phone number was found in a prostitute’s little black book, and former representative Mark Foley was caught sending dirty emails to a former House page. “What’s up with the GOP? Is there something in the water?”