Chicago Journalist Roger Simon of the Politico (not Roger L. Simon, the mystery writer and conservative blogger) does not like conservative Senator Larry Craig one bit, but even the liberal Simon thinks Craig should fight to keep his Senate seat.

Larry Craig should not resign from the Senate.

He should force the Senate to expel him, which the Constitution provides for, but which the Senate has not done to any of its members since 1862.

If he can, Craig also should withdraw his guilty plea to what police say was “lewd conduct” in a public restroom at Minneapolis airport in June.

I have no doubt that Craig, an Idaho Republican, did what a cop says he did.

But I have a big doubt as to whether any of it was a crime. And I think a jury would have a reasonable doubt that he is guilty as charged.

Larry Craig committed a lewd act in that restroom? Larry Craig committed disorderly conduct in that restroom?

Let the prosecutors prove it in court.

Just because Craig is a jerk doesn’t mean he shouldn’t get civil rights in this country. …

According to the Senate website: “Since 1789, the Senate has expelled only 15 of its entire membership. Of that number, 14 were charged with support of the Confederacy during the Civil War.”

The non-Civil War expulsion was that of William Blount of Tennessee, a Democratic Republican, who was expelled in 1797 for “a plan to incite the Creek and Cherokee Indians to aid the British in conquering the Spanish territory of West Florida.”

Larry Craig is no William Blount.

Larry Craig is a hypocrite, a liar and a fool.

But if we kicked people out of the Senate for that, how many senators would we have left?

Gateway Pundit has excellent coverage of the democrats’ Senatorial surrender slumber party.

Don’t miss the 2:41 video of Joe Lieberman speaking truth to defeatism.

John Hinderaker, at Power-Line, quotes an eloquent remonstrance from John McCain to his despicable colleagues in the Senate. He titled it: A Man Addresses the Boys.

Let us keep in the front of our minds the likely consequences of premature withdrawal from Iraq. Many of my colleagues would like to believe that, should the withdrawal amendment we are currently debating become law, it would mark the end of this long effort. They are wrong. Should the Congress force a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, it would mark a new beginning, the start of a new, more dangerous, and more arduous effort to contain the forces unleashed by our disengagement.
No matter where my colleagues came down in 2003 about the centrality of Iraq to the war on terror, there can simply be no debate that our efforts in Iraq today are critical to the wider struggle against violent Islamic extremism. Already, the terrorists are emboldened, excited that America is talking not about winning in Iraq, but is rather debating when we should lose.

***

Mr. President, the terrorists are in this war to win it. The question is: Are we?

***

The supporters of this amendment respond that they do not by any means intend to cede the battlefield to al Qaeda; on the contrary, their legislation would allow U.S. forces, presumably holed up in forward operating bases, to carry out targeted counterterrorism operations. But our own military commanders say that this approach will not succeed, and that moving in with search and destroy missions to kill and capture terrorists, only to immediately cede the territory to the enemy, is the failed strategy of the past three and a half years.

***

Mr. President, this fight is about Iraq but not about Iraq alone. It is greater than that and more important still, about whether America still has the political courage to fight for victory or whether we will settle for defeat, with all of the terrible things that accompany it. We cannot walk away gracefully from defeat in this war.

What a fine leader and desirable Republican presidential candidate a reliably conservative John McCain could have made!

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I don’t agree with Harold Meyerson‘s politics or his defeatist view of the situation in Iraq, but I wholeheartedly endorse his characterization of a number of Republican senators:

Anyone searching for the highest forms of invertebrate life need look no further than the floor of the U.S. Senate last week and this. These spineless specimens go by various names — Republican moderates; respected senior Republicans; Dick Lugar, John Warner, Pete Domenici, George Voinovich.

But if weak-kneed Republican bedwetters running for political cover are rightly described as invertebrate, leftist democrats who make a profession and career out of opposing their country’s cause and stabbing American troops in the back are obviously still lower on the evolutionary scale.

The US Senate had its first Hindu prayer yesterday, which remarkable expression of ecumenicism was disrupted by the protests of three Christians.

1:07 video

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How long do you think it will be before the Senate starts having Wiccan invocations?

Gun laws are often written in such a way as to criminalize “possession” when possession consists of merely holding somebody else’s legally owned gun in one’s hand briefly. In this case, the possession was a senator’s pistol in a briefcase being carried by an aide.

FoxNews

U.S. Capitol Police arrested a top aide to Sen. Jim Webb on Monday after he tried to enter a Senate office building carrying a loaded pistol and two fully loaded magazines that belonged to the senator.

Phillip Thompson sent a bag through the X-ray machine at Russell Senate Office Building, where Webb’s office is located. It detected the weapon and Capitol Police say they determined that Thompson didn’t have a license to carry the gun in Washington, D.C. Thompson was arrested and charged with carrying a pistol without a license and possession of an unregistered firearm and unregistered ammunition.

A senior Democratic aide said Webb gave the bag that contained the gun to Thompson when the aide drove the senator to the airport. Thompson said he forgot it was in the bag when he took it into the office building.

AP:

Republican and Democratic senators warned Tuesday against a drift toward war with an emboldened Iran and suggested the Bush administration was missing a chance to engage its longtime adversary in potentially helpful talks over next-door Iraq.

“What I think many of us are concerned about is that we stumble into active hostilities with Iran without having aggressively pursued diplomatic approaches, without the American people understanding exactly what’s taking place,” Sen. Barack Obama (news, bio, voting record), D-Ill., told John Negroponte, who is in line to become the nation’s No. 2 diplomat as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s deputy.

In reality, we’ve been at war with Iran since 1979. Or, more properly,one should say: Iran has been at war with us since 1979. We have not bothered to notice.

The merry gang of former John Kerry supporters in control of the US Intelligence Community under the Bush Administration have produced two extremely partisan reports, establishing that they were right all along: Saddam Hussein was perfectly harmless, had no WMDs, and had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or terrorism generally, and Bush lied.

These conclusions are reached by the artful selection of data, and by systematically dismissing the sources of all evidence to the contrary of a preferred reality as unreliable on a variety of questionable bases. This source spoke to the Press, that proves he’s lying. And that source took a job with the Iraqi opposition, obviously he was always peddling propaganda on their behalf. If you throw out every piece of evidence you don’t like, using any convenient rationalization, it isn’t difficult to arrive at the conclusions you desired all along.

The reports were adopted, and amended, in a series of partisan votes, in which so-called Republican Senators Olympias Snowe (Maine) and Chuck Hagel (Nebraska) voted with the democrats.

New York Times story

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The Reports:

Postwar Findings on WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism

Report on Information Provided by the Iraqi National Congress

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AJStrata notes that media establishment journalists can’t read.

Now I know why journalists get their stories so wrong so often – they lack basic reading comprehension skills. With all the hoopla about the Senate Intelligence report supposedly saying there were no ties between Saddam and Terrorists (despite Iraq documents which log the training of thousands of terrorists, and notes regarding meetings with Al Qaeda) it might behoove people to read them for themselves.

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Flopping Aces quotes some sources the reports overlooked:

Like the 2002 Congressional Resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq.

“Whereas members of al-Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq…

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Macranger

I’m still weeding through this “report”. First impressions I got is that it seems to read as if it were trying to convince me that Saddam had no ties to Al Qaeda as if by repeating over and over again I would descend in to a state of BDS and start a new liberal blog…

Our Senate Intelligence Committee could care less about getting to the truth, for the Democrats on the committee it was just another way to get Bush, nothing more, and nothing less.