Poor Larry Craig. He didn’t even really do anything all that bloody specific, as far as I can tell and yet he’s already been forced to resign from three committees. The officer said in his arrest report that Craig began tapping his right foot, touche…

I believe we should enact policies and laws solely based on their merits. The messenger is irrelevant. Why? Well, Lyndon Johnson was an ornery bastard, but he signed the Civil Rights Act. What if some segregationist had gone on a crusade to bring his infidelities to the public and derailed that legislation? What if that dude who some people believe was Abraham Lincoln’s lover came forward in 1860 and derailed his campaign?

If you make these discussions solely about the issues, the legislation stands or falls on its own merits. You can find dirt on anybody if you dig deep enough. Why should the message be subject to the (perceived) trustworthiness of the messenger?

There is a very good reason politicians shouldn’t be hypocrites. And that’s because people who walk the walk are generally much more effective at talking the talk. So I’m entirely in sympathy with the people who say Craig should step down because he’s not going to be effective as an advocate of his family-values policies anymore. That’s realpolitik, that’s life. You go with the horse that wins the race.

Obviously we can’t completely separate message from messenger. We’re all human, after all. But I think it’s what something we should aspire to.

public leaders are not the same as ordinary people of the public. When they decided to become politicians, that is something they had to - or should have - accepted. They are held to different standards, simply because their decisions and choices affect an entire people and country that they profess to have the best interest of.

Larry Flynt does not have a problem with what people do in their private lives (the dude banged a chicken or something when he was a kid, how could he have?)
As far as his commitment to exposing the hypocrisy of the American Senate, there I will agree with him that bringing hypocrisy in public leaders out in the open are crucially important.

the definition of hypocrisy - the practice of disguising one action or statement by simulating another which is believed to be more acceptable (stop and think on this one for a bit); pretended goodness or sincerity.

You asked:

Why can’t we just concentrate on the policy?

because, if what a man does directly contradicts what he advocates, how then can his words or policies be deemed to carry any conviction whatsoever (I am not saying “do they still carry weight?”; that could be as much a matter of accident as anything else. Conviction, though, is an important consideration when someone is telling you what the correct way to live your life is, and makes decisions which could impact on your personal life. Weight is about impartial worth; conviction is about the accuracy of personal belief on a matter).

That last part is the most important, and the reason why politicians above all cannot be exempted from how their personal lives reflect/ discords with their publicly professed policies - because politicians and public leaders are not ordinary people, what they do and say and (the policies) they decide impact on the PERSONAL lives of the people beneath them.

It has nothing to do with morality in the Bible thumper sense, it is not wrong in that sense.

Hypocrisy is wrong in the sense of it is a flat out stupid method of behavior.

If, for example, a man walks under the banner of women’s rights, and tells me that I should respect women, not treat them like garbage and above all not force myself on them sexually because it is wrong and threatens to disrupt society or [insert whatever reason here], and yet I find out he has rape and sexual harassment charges against him - seriously, how can a man such as that have any weight of conviction when it comes to his pro-womanist policies? would I exempt his behavior and focus only on what he tells me to do, although he himself has done/ is doing the opposite? why? why is it not good for me but good for him? more to the point - would I actually believe and adopt his policies?
of course not - 1) monkey see, monkey do, or 2) “dude’s talking shite - when a woman says no, what she means is: Take me, you stud you!”

I’m afraid I’m going to have to disagree with your take on this matter overall and would suggest that you are perhaps a little too fixated on examining the sexual/ personal indiscretions being exposed. That is almost irrelevant, it is still about the principle of the thing (hypocrisy).

Consider the much wider ramifications of politicians who are not held accountable for any glitch where their personal lives contradict their professed policies and dictates:

would there have been a Sept 11?
a war in Iraq?
if no war in Iraq, would it have been possible that New Orleans would have been better prepared and defended against hurricane Katrina? or, at the very least, would more services and monies have been available to faster evacuate, provide better medical and other services and help re-build in the aftermath?
the genocide in Rwanda?
the still, right now, blatant disregard for human rights happening in Zimbabwe? (where do you think African leaders learn to adopt such callous attitudes of personal aggrandizement to the detriment of their peoples, knowing that they stand little risk of being held accountable?)
would racism and sexism still flourish?

after all, if politicians are not held accountable for the conduct of their own lives, why on earth would they seriously care about how to protect and provide for the people they have been elected to serve?

when faced with such a system, our only recourse, feeble as it is, is to try and vote people into office that we trust. we can’t trust the system to check and balance properly, so we try to feel good about the people in charge. and to that end, information about incidents like this become a part of the decision making process.

Apparently, it is a crime, at least in Minnesota.

Good to know. Some of the analyses I read yesterday suggested it wasn’t, but I suppose we’ll all know exactly where that line is soon enough. Tonight’s local news stories across the nation: “So if Larry Craig had done this in our state, could he have gone to jail?”

And anybody who is so naive about how the law works… probably shouldn’t be a lawmaker.

Yeah. But I say let the voters make that determination. They didn’t re-elect Gary Condit, after all. (Although voters did re-elect Jefferson, and they keep electing Marion Barry to office again and again, which is enough to make anyone take a good, hard look at democracy.)