A not so gay week for the G.O.P.

In a city known for its gravity, with the ability to bring the haughtiest of the haughty back to earth, an amazing week passed in the world of politics. Not since a chubby intern sucked her way into the hearts of salacious journalists everywhere, was a story of one man’s love of fellatio so widely reported.

And the tapping sound coming from the stall belonging to Sen. Larry “I am not gay” Craig, a staunch conservative (especially on matters dealing with gays), came after an already brutal stretch for Republicans.

It started at the top when President Bush compared the Iraq War to the one conflict he’s tried for the better part of four years to distance the fiasco from: Vietnam.

The veteran of the mighty Texas Air National Guard told a Veterans of Foreign Wars group in Kansas City that "To withdraw without getting the job done would be devastating…..and unlike in Vietnam, if we were to withdraw before the job was done, this enemy would follow us home.”

Beyond the ridiculous premise that Sunni and Shiite insurgents are going to obtain U.S. passports and continue their civil war on our soil, lies an even more baffling argument the president is trying to make.

A consensus can be found in most analytical circles that, in terms of departure, our troops left Vietnam far too late, not early. And that our presence destabilized Cambodia and opened the door for Khmer Rouge, under the leadership of Pol Pot, to execute an estimated 1.5 million people.

This is why in the past the administration went to absurd lengths not to hint at any analogies between the two foreign campaigns. For a solid argument exists in each case that U.S. military escalations turned once functional societies into regional buffets of bloodletting and anarchy, with few of the desired objectives being realized.

The comparisons left most of the country scratching their heads – even the heads belonging to those dwindling few still in the president’s wheelhouse.

Army Gen. John Johns (a dude who clearly was without creative parents), a Vietnam veteran who spent 12 years specializing in counter-insurgency missions, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution that "What I learned in Vietnam is that U.S. combat forces could not effectively conduct counter-insurgency operations,” he said, “the longer we stay there, the worse it's going to get."

Then, the already bad week became worse as Bush headed to Crawford and the pesky brush that needed pulling back.

Sen. John Warner of Virginia, a leading voice for Republicans in terms of military strategy, said the U.S. should begin withdrawing small numbers of troops in Iraq by Christmas. His comments were followed by a report from the Government Accountability Office that determined only three of 18 benchmarks, set previously by lawmakers for security and political stability in Iraq, had been met.

Warner went ahead and did the tour de talk shows on Sunday, laying out coherent strategies on why the Iraqi government needs to be held to account and why allied commitments must not be open-ended.



With Monday, however, came an event that appeared would never happen: The resignation of Selective Amnesia Al. The attorney general had become a colorful piñata – the defining symbol of nepotism’s trump over knowledge within an administration more irrelevant by the day.

But the Gonzales resignation was drowned out by the Craig incident, a weird twist in a life of a man almost nobody had ever heard of. The G.O.P. quickly tried to makeup the black eye and demanded the three-term senator - whose explanation of the events is laughable (A guilty plea to a lewd act in a men’s room stall will make it go away?) - resign.

Craig caved to his party’s wishes the day before another White House official jumped ship. Press Secretary Tony Snow, the generally likable face of the administration, who also is fighting a resurgence of cancer, stepped down. Even though Snow recently said the Iraqi Parliament went on vacation simply because Baghdad is 135 degrees in August, missing the obvious irony that our troops spend their days outside, he did an admirable job under the circumstances.

And Karl Rove exited stage right on Friday – meaning the once mighty Republican vanguard had officially fallen victim to gravity’s downward tug.