Flamin’ Nora, this is NEVER going to end, is it (via Henry at Gay Orbit)?

Sen. Larry Craig filed court papers Monday seeking to withdraw his guilty plea in an airport sex sting, arguing that he entered the plea under stress caused by media inquiries into his sexuality.

Craig, an Idaho Republican, pleaded guilty in August to disorderly conduct following his June arrest in a sting operation in a men’s bathroom at the Minneapolis airport. A police report alleged that Craig had solicited sex from a male officer at the airport, which the senator has denied.

Okay, I can certainly understand being stressed out by the knowledge that the media are investigating your sex life. But you’d think that being under the gun that way would make you even more likely to protest your innocence as loudly as possible at every turn. Certainly, people who are stressed out often make snap decisions that don’t make much sense to outsiders, but it’s hard to interpret Craig’s guilty plea as anything but an acknowledgment that he’d done something he knew he could be busted for. (BTW, what could that hand-swiping movement possibly signal? “I can pay by credit card if you’re seeking genero$ity”?)

If some cop in a public toilet showed me his badge from a neighboring stall and told me to follow him out, I’d be pretty baffled about what he was on about. I don’t pretend to be a choirboy; it’s not that I’m unaware that sex goes on in toilets. It’s not even that I never have throbbingly urgent homosexual thoughts in airport bathrooms–just that they’re along the lines of, Damn it! This tube of Origins Make a Difference Rejuvenating Hand Treatment in my bag is WAY more than four ounces! Great…with my luck, it’ll get confiscated, and for what? Do they expect me to terrorize a 747 full of passengers into submission by getting a flight attendant in a hammerlock and threatening to over-hydrate her skin? And you just know the drug store by the gate, if there is one, will have nothing but Jergens crap that goes on like motor oil…. A police officer who interrupted this reverie to inform me that any accompanying hand and foot motions suggested plans to engage in illegal behavior would get a blank look from me. “What…you think I was trying to sell you drugs or something?” Plenty of people plead guilty to crimes to avoid alternatives that seem worse, so a guilty plea doesn’t necessarily imply moral culpability, but Craig seemed awfully defensive for someone who wasn’t doing anything unseemly.

Maybe I’m just naive, but it seems to me that the best way to stop shenanigans in the rest rooms is to post prominent signs that say “PREMISES MONITORED BY POLICE FOR YOUR SAFETY,” then to be sure a police officer does, in fact, look over the place once every ten minutes or so. If Craig really was caught by an excessively zealous patrol officer, then it’s only reasonable to wish him the best in getting his name cleared. (Eric thinks there may have been a constitutional issue, too.)

But whichever way Craig exercised poor judgment, it was still poor judgment, and he’s making himself and his party look like fools. I wish the guy would just stop the press conferences, quietly go about seeking his day in court, and devote himself to a life of anonymous service to others until he figures out how not to be such a public flibbertigibbet. Yeah, I know–it’ll never happen, and I’ve just written a post about the whole ridiculous mess, which I’d promised myself I wouldn’t do.

I never thought I’d live to see the day when I prayed the media would get back to obsessing over Britney.

Well, Tokyo wasn’t wiped out by last night’s Epochal Vortex of Death, though of course it managed to screw up air and rail transit schedules beautifully. At my office, we were ordered to leave by eight o’clock (which people do have to be told here in Japan). One thing you never get used to if you’re from the States (or Australia, say my antipodean friends), is seeing weather graphics like this:

Notice the way the storm essentially covers the entire width of the country as it moves northward. There’s been only one confirmed death, and there have been several dozen injuries, but things appear not to have been as bad as the “Storm of the Century” (all seven years of it?) fears.