Hi Joan,

You've really got the story wrong. The surface story is that Larry Craig is a tortured homophobe, and that's something that normal, relatively well-adjusted people can relate to.

But it's not the story. The real story is that Craig is a sociopath-- a self-serving sociopath. He has constructed an image in Idaho of 'rancher, family man, conservative values.' It's all nonsense. Before Larry became a politician, he was a failed donut shop manager in Weiser, Idaho. Immediately after the page scandal broke (good old-fashioned pedophilia) he was proactive in his denial of impropriety. He was married off by the Reps. immediately thereafter (his engagement was announced in Idaho during the aftermath). The kids he claims are adopted-- hers. His proclivities have never been much of an issue for her and him because they, for the most part, live separate lives, though she has been well-taken-care-of by the machine. She's worked for the Beef Council, and enjoyed the status of a Senator's wife. Notice how none of the children have stepped forward to defend their 'father'. Larry's voting record has always been one that has supported the strong corporate interests (old-line interests) that have put him in power, and often been against the good of rural Idahoans, who he claims to represent.

The real story is betrayal-- how someone like Larry Craig would be such a poseur to hang on to power, and how ignorant and stupid people can be with keeping someone like him in power.

The gay story, of course, is getting a lot of traction. But it's really an insult to gays to equate Larry's behavior with sexual repression. That's a relatively small part of the story of a profoundly self-serving individual who has exploited a backward, rural state for his own ends, as well as how hard it is to get people to realize change is imperative when the leadership uses their cultural disposition for their own personal exploitation.

As I've said in earlier letters, the issue isn't Larry Craig's homosexuality. It is Larry Craig's sociopathic behavior.

Idaho politicians are, as a rule, the most dramatic demonstrators of the Republican ethos in the nation. People from the Left try to come up with rational explanations for R behavior-- but they inevitably fail. Lefties really don't understand that these people are crazy. It's the reason that we see no impeachment proceedings against Bush, or a full-scale revolt in the Senate.

But that doesn't mean that they're not. They're crazy. And the fact of the matter is the chief Crazy has his finger on the nuclear button.

The Larry Craig situation shows a bigger problem with the Left than the RIght. What is it going to take before D politicians really realize this stuff?

As I said earlier, the real story is not that Craig was a closeted, conflicted gay male. The real story is that Larry Craig is a true sociopath.

It is a profound failure of the Left that we find all sorts of strange rationalizations to escape facing up to our responsibility to remove these people. Larry Craig needs to be removed from office because he belongs in a mental institution and is a threat to society. Like the famous 'Congressman' Helen Chenoweth before him, these people aren't just acting crazy. They really are.

Reading through the letters that followed my first posting, it still seems that liberals still can't believe the reality of Larry Craig that I stated in my first letter.

The question is this: what is it going to take?

As a timber activist, I certainly will admit that I have a particular axe to grind with Larry-- after contributing to damning evidence on the Senate floor against his 'Healthy Forests' Act, he sent federal agents after me, leading to an appearance in court where the Federal Judge embarrassingly threw the charges out. Larry Craig was also singularly responsible for the Salvage Rider of 1995.

But there still is, in the liberal community, this profound disconnect between the Rs, their actions, and the actual consequences of their actions. Maybe it's just too hard to realize that Larry Craig was primarily responsible for 100s of square miles of clearcuts-- or a contributor to the Iraq War, where now close to 1M people have died.

There are real consequences to these people's actions. They know what those consequences are. They don't care. All that they care is that they get to give or receive sexual favors, or whatever pleasures them, at their own discretion.

That's sociopathy. How can we continue to make snarky comments about this guy? Would we make snarky comments about other major criminals?

That piece about Mitt Romney is the closest thing to insanity that I've read in Salon.

Being the President is not about making someone's Christmas wish come true. It's not about making an abstract statement about how religion shouldn't matter. It matters on the most pragmatic level about what that person is going to do-- because on the most primal level, that person has a well-defined responsibility for everyone in this nation.

What malarkey Mitt Romney believes in matters a lot-- especially if he advertises it as something that moves his decision-making. The nonsense that he and the other evangelical Christians believe in, as far as the compounded millenialism that all those cults share, affects whether we're going to jump-start a nuclear war in the Middle East to build the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, or water policy in the West, where the sunny Mormon disposition has driven growth in Las Vegas to vastly over-exploit the region's water supply.

I'm at wit's end on what to say to get people to wake up and realize that politics, and the decisions that flow from it matters. It's unbelievably dispiriting to see that someone like Scherer can't really believe that it does.