So you've come to DWT expecting another round of childish, tasteless Larry Craig-being-gay jokes? Yeah, okay, can do

Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho)
Celebrating a Quarter-Century
of People Gossiping About Me Being Gay
(1982-2007)

In his younger years, our Larry plays dress-up with
"one of the nation's most requested cowboy entertainers" (by
his own description), Cowboy Rudy. (cowboyrudy.com)

Attention, people, this is serious. It's our Larry's silver anniversary. Which naturally raises the question:

What do you get for the man who's had folks officially gossiping about his homosexuality for a full quarter of a century?

Is he listed anywhere?

Oh, you don't think it's a problem? Okay, let's say you think long and hard and come up with something really thoughtful and appropriate. A solid-silver cock ring, say.

It may be a tad familiar for someone you've never so much as personally shared an adjacent men's-room stall with, but what the heck, you decide to run with it. You're going for "the personal touch." (If there's a pun in there, it's mostly intentional.) And then it turns out he's already got one! If not an entire collection. Or else he's a tad shy about keeping it with the rest of his jewelry, where his wife might see it and get that same wrong idea people have been gossiping openly about for a full quarter-century now.

So now he has to go try to exchange it for something he needs, like maybe a set of butt plugs. (I'm just making it up as we go here.) But he doesn't have the receipt! Have you ever tried to do that? Have you?

But seriously, what are you planning to give our boy? Isn't it tacky just to send a card, presumably from the "Congratulations on Not Being Gay (Wink-Wink)" section. Say, did the Singing Senators make any records? (I can't find any on Amazon.com.)

My own inclination would be a copy of Michelangelo Signorile's Outing Yourself: How to Come Out as Lesbian or Gay to Your Family, Friends, and Coworkers. Amazon's got the paperback edition for $11.05 plus shipping, with used copies from $1.37. Our Larry might also appreciate Signorile's still-stirring Queer in America: Sex, the Media, and the Closets of Power, for its consideration of the "closet of power" dearest to the senator's heart, the one in Washington, D.C.


COUNTDOWN POSTSCRIPT

By the way, did you catch the Countdown Players' Dragnet-style dramatic reenactment last night--straight from the official officer's police report--of the great men's-room encounter? Favorite moment here: when "the senator" hands the officer a business card, and says, "What do you think of that?"--and we see a business-size card that has nothing on it except the hand-scribbled word:

SENATOR

UPDATE: HOWIE WEIGHS IN

Just when I had finally decided that I had had it with Larry Craig stories, Ken ambushed me with the one above. How could I resist jumping back in? (Were I a Republican I'd say, "He started it!") I've thought a lot about this since it first came out that Senator Craig was arrested for soliciting sex in a public restroom, something he has been prone to do-- and deny-- over the years. I went from mean-spirited schadenfreude on Monday afternoon to pity on Tuesday and anger towards his Republican homophobic tormentors on Wednesday.

Today I called Senator Craig's office to offer a redemptive strategy that will help him capture his dignity and his soul. I don't think he'll bite. But I very much agree with Barney Frank, who kind of outed him back in October of '06 on the Bill Maher show. He didn't actually out him. He just left the question hanging and said something about hypocrisy: "The right to privacy should not be a right to hypocrisy and people who want to demonize other people shouldn't then be able to go home and close the door and do it themselves."

This morning Barney took issue with Craig's homophobic colleagues, playing to the GOP's Know Nothing base, like John McCain and Norm Coleman, who have called for Senator Craig to resign at once. Barney's message to Craig: resist!

The GOP is after Craig's scalp so they can go to their base and say, "See, we'll not all toe-tappin' homos and when we find one, we root him out." They actually applauded David Diapers Vitter (R-LA) when he admitted he had broken the law by hiring hookers. No one asked him to resign from his committees. And no one asked Ted Stevens (R-AK) to step down from his committees, let alone from the Senate, after the FBI announced an investigation into a massive and systematic bribery operation Stevens has been running, an operation based on abusing his committee assignments. But Stevens and Vitter are straight, so Republicans don't even care what laws they break. "What he did, it’s hypocritical," said Barney of Craig this morning, "but it’s not an abuse of his office in the sense that he was taking money for corrupt votes," a subtle slap at Stevens and Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, a closet queen himself, who is leading the charge to purge Craig.

Barney went on: "It’s one thing to say that someone can’t be trusted to vote without being corrupt, it’s another to say that he can’t be trusted to go to the bathroom by himself."

And as far as resigning, Jeff Merkley the ballsy Democrat looking to replace Oregon's rubber stamp Republican Gordon Smith, has a far better target than the pathetic Larry Craig. Merkley sent the pathetic George W. Bush an evite suggesting he resign.