His victory will result in a horde of applications by nearly everyone else who has entered into a plea in that court (and perhaps all similar courts in Minnesota, depending on how they handle cases where no lawyer is present upon a defendant’s plea of guilty to a crime), who will each contend that they were not “intelligent enough” to proceed without counsel.

“After all,” they will all say, “if Senator Craig wasn’t intelligent enough to enter a knowing and voluntary plea, then how could you expect little old me to be intelligent enough to do the same thing?”

So Craig’s battle is made even more challenging by what will be his own personal kryptonite, the notion of judicial economy and the importance of stare decisis. Show me the judge who wants to write the decision which will encourage an avalanche of new motions by defendants seeking the withdrawal of their previously accepted guilty pleas, and which will require the creation of new court procedures required to protect unrepresented defendants such as Craig from offering a guilty plea, and I will show you a judge who has not only extraordinary confidence in his or her ability to keep her job, but also real guts.

There is surely something to be said for the notion of assuring that defendants who are prepared to plead guilty to a criminal offense (which will lead to them having a criminal record for the rest of their life) either have counsel appointed by the state, or be required to privately retain their own lawyer if they’re able to. For many of us, that seems like second nature. But for a US Senator to contend that his plea wasn’t intelligently offered – especially after he signed a plea agreement which said, among other things that “the court will not accept the guilty plea of someone who claims to be innocent,” and that he was making “no claim of innocence” at the time he signed the agreement – well, one just has to wonder how the same person can claim that they’re intelligent enough to sit in the Senate.

This all happened before there was much awareness of AIDS; I wonder how many of those guys (and their wives and girlfriends) are still alive.

I am willing to bet that Senator Craig thinks of himself as gay; he just likes to have sex with strange men in bathrooms, and he got caught trolling for one. The best way to tell–or live–a lie is to tell it to yourself until you believe it, and forget that you ever knew it was a lie.

This ‘supreme denial’ is what makes Republicans and other self righteous scoundrels so successful.