REPUBLICAN CLOSET CASE JIM McCRERY UNEXPECTEDLY ANNOUNCES RETIREMENT... HMMMM...

When homophobic Louisiana Republican Jim McCrery was first exposed as a closet queen some years ago, his first instinct-- like that of Wide Stance Larry Craig-- was to find some woman to marry him. Instead of making a business arrangement for a ready-made family the way his then House colleague from Idaho did, McCrery married his secretary. Yeah, yeah, I know it sounds like a cliche but . . . it worked. First elected in 1988, McCrery has been elected again and again, as an extreme right-winger, in a backward north Louisiana district (LA-04). And he's risen in the Republican caucus to a position of some power and influence.

He just announced, quite suddenly, that he's giving it all up. A lot of water under the bridge since he was first outed and responded-- before marrying the secretary-- by getting drunk at a stripper (females) bar on the Carolina coast and dancing with a woman's panties on his head while a staffer anonymously alerted the media. I suppose in Shreveport that proved . . . something.

Speculation is that someone has something on Rep. McCrery and that another shoe will soon be dropping. His district is pretty red, but Democrats have been winning in much worse CDs. Louisiana, on the other hand, has a political system only tangentially related to the rest of America's.