File this under: how can we miss you if you won't go away? Larry Craig has announced that he'll serve out the rest of his term in the Senate notwithstanding the fact that a Minnesota judge rejected his attempt to withdraw his guilty plea for disorderly conduct.

You may remember that I have some mixed emotions about the Craig debacle: glee over "more moral than thou" Republicans being exposed for their hypocrisy is warring it out with my outrage at the Minnesota Police Department's tactics, and my pity for a man who seems so scared of his sexuality that he's reduced to seeking out anonymous gay bathroom sex while loudly proclaiming his heterosexuality is warring it out with my anger that Craig has actively worked to undermine my humanity.

But overlaying all of that is my conviction that Craig has shown himself to be too stupid to be entrusted with any job that requires him to make decisions more complex than choosing a restaurant for dinner. And his most recent decision is just more evidence of that. The Republican leadership despises him and wants nothing more than to see him gone. He's been stripped of his leadership post on all committees. No one is going to work with him to pass legislation and he's sure as hell lost any institutional power in the Senate that he might have had. He can't even credibly threaten to jump ship and vote with the Democrats because he's a conservative Republican and nobody will believe him. Is he hoping to hunker down and ride out the storm? Fat chance, not in an era where the politics of sexuality is so contentious. Is he trying to set up a post-Senate career as a lobbyist? If that's the case, pissing off the Republican leadership is probably not a good idea. Really, one wonders how he even managed to make it to the Senate with political instincts like these....