Novelist Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) is probably best remembered for her infamous short story, “The Lottery”, which was originally published in The New Yorker in 1948. I say “infamous” because it caused a number of subscribers to cancel the magazine in protest. They felt, with some justice, that they had been duped into reading what appeared to be a harmless account of the folkways of a small New England town, only to find that the story had an absolutely horrific ending.

I will say no more about the story itself. If you’ve not read it already, it deserves to be approached without so much as a hint as to the outcome.

But Miss Jackson did give a lecture, “Biography of a Story”, which chronicled the flood of vituperation to which she was subjected once her story appeared in print. Miss Jackson was living in a remote town in Vermont at the time. But The New Yorker duly forwarded the hundreds of letters, mostly negative, that were sent to her care of the magazine.

As Miss Jackson said in her lecture: “One of the most terrifying aspects of publishing stories and books is the realization that they are going to be read, and read by strangers. I had never fully realized this before, although I had of course in my imagination dwelt lovingly upon the thought of the millions and millions of people who were going to be uplifted and enriched and delighted by the stories I wrote. It had simply never occurred to me that these million and millions of people might be so far from being uplifted that they would sit down and write me letters that I was downright scared to open …”

Miss Jackson’s lecture was studded with excerpts from these letters. For example:

(Massachusetts) I will never buy The New Yorker again. I resent being tricked into reading perverted stories like “The Lottery.”

(Minnesota) Never in the world did I think I’d protest a story in The New Yorker, but really, gentlemen, “The Lottery” seems to me to be in incredibly bad taste. I read it while I was soaking in the tub and was tempted to put my head under water and end it all.

(New Jersey) Surely it was only a bad dream the author had?

(Oregon) Where in heaven’s name does there exist such a barbarity as described in the story?

(Canada) Tell Miss Jackson to stay out of Canada.

But none of the letters Miss Jackson received in response to her story was to prove as mortifying as one that was sent to her by a man in California. This man took it for granted that Miss Jackson would know who he was, and his name did seem vaguely familiar to her, although she couldn’t identify him precisely.

At length, she decided that he must be another writer, and that the safest approach to answering his letter would be to reply with something “carefully complimentary and noncommittal.”

Shortly after she mailed her reply, some friends of hers from California came to visit. While they were there, she asked off-handedly if they had ever heard of her mysterious correspondent. They had indeed: He had just been narrowly acquitted of murdering his wife with an ax.

With a sinking feeling, Miss Jackson looked up the carbon copy of her reply to this gentleman. “Thank you very much for your kind letter about my story,” she had written. “I admire your work, too.”

Clearly, Miss Jackson miscalculated the reaction of her audience. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have fair warning. Her agent told her that she didn’t care for the story, but added that her job was to sell it, not like it. The fiction editor of The New Yorker expressed similar misgivings – but bought the story, nonetheless. Despite the hate mail, Miss Jackson was lucky. As a fiction writer, she had the luxury of waiting until her strange tale was recognized as a horror classic. Eventually, it would be the basis of three films, in addition to radio, TV and stage adaptations.

Speechwriters are not so lucky. If we miscalculate the reaction of our audiences, we don’t get a second chance to make our case.

As far as I’m concerned, the heroic last stand for which Davy Crockett should be remembered is not the one he made against the hordes of advancing Mexicans at the Alamo, but the one he made against the hordes of greedy, ambitious politicians in Washington, eager to spend the taxpayers’ money.

Logically, the money we pay in federal taxes ought to be spent on programs that serve the nation as a whole. But Washington doesn’t work that way.

Members of Congress know that diverting federal funds to projects that benefit their home districts helps to get them re-elected. So every year, billions of federal dollars are devoted to pork-barrel expenditures known as “earmarks.”

Republicans railed against this practice in the past, but once they were in power, they proved to be even worse offenders than the Democrats. When the Democrats regained control of Congress last year, they made pious promises to curb the proliferation of earmarks. But, to no one’s surprise, it now appears doubtful that these promises will ever be fulfilled, even in part.

“Bringing home the bacon” has always been one of the primary ways that politicians maintain themselves in power. But every now and then we see a courageous exception to this rule –- like Davy Crockett.

Crockett served in the House of Representatives from 1827 to 1831, and again from 1832 to 1835. According to a biography published in 1884 by his friend Edward Ellis, Crockett once gave a speech on the House floor entitled, “Not Yours to Give.”

As Ellis tells the story, the House was considering a bill for the relief of the widow of a distinguished naval officer. There was general agreement that this was a worthy cause, and everyone expected the bill to pass easily. But then Crockett rose and gave what he himself might have called a “sockdolager” of a speech.

He said this:

Mr. Speaker -- I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money. Some eloquent appeals have been made to us upon the ground that it is a debt due the deceased. Mr. Speaker, the deceased lived long after the close of the war; he was in office to the day of his death, and I have never heard that the government was in arrears to him. This government can owe no debts but for services rendered, and at a stipulated price. If it is a debt, how much is it? Has it been audited, and the amount due ascertained? If it is a debt, this is not the place to present it for payment, or to have its merits examined. If it is a debt, we owe more than we can ever hope to pay, for we owe the widow of every soldier who fought in the War of 1812 precisely the same amount. There is a woman in my neighborhood, the widow of as gallant a man as ever shouldered a musket. He fell in battle. She is as good in every respect as this lady, and is as poor. She is earning her daily bread by her daily labor; but if I were to introduce a bill to appropriate five or ten thousand dollars for her benefit, I should be laughed at, and my bill would not get five votes in this House. There are thousands of widows in the country just such as the one I have spoken of, but we never hear of any of these large debts to them. Sir, this is no debt. The government did not owe it to the deceased when he was alive; it could not contract it after he died. I do not wish to be rude, but I must be plain. Every man in this House knows it is not a debt. We cannot, without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblance of authority to appropriate it as a charity. Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much of our own money as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week's pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks.

When Crockett sat down, the bill was dead. He had shamed it to death. Furthermore, according to Ellis, not a single member of Congress offered to join him in contributing a week’s pay for the relief of poor widow, about whose plight so many of them had waxed eloquent when they thought they were going to be spending the taxpayers’ money rather than their own.

At that time, the records of the House did not include transcripts of speeches made on the floor. So some historians have questioned the authenticity of Crockett’s speech. But Crockett is known to have opposed a similar bill in 1828, and the speech certainly sounds like him.

So does the observation that Ellis says Crockett made to him in private after he gave his speech:

There is one thing now to which I will call your attention. You remember that I proposed to give a week's pay. There are in that House many very wealthy men -- men who think nothing of spending a week's pay, or a dozen of them, for a dinner or a wine party when they have something to accomplish by it. Some of those same men made beautiful speeches upon the great debt of gratitude which the country owed the deceased -- a debt which could not be paid by money -- and the insignificance and worthlessness of money, particularly so insignificant a sum as $10,000, when weighed against the honor of the nation. Yet not one of them responded to my proposition. Money with them is nothing but trash when it is to come out of the people. But it is the one great thing for which most of them are striving, and many of them sacrifice honor, integrity, and justice to obtain it.

There is an old saying that punctuality is the courtesy of kings. So it is. But there are other kinds of royal courtesy, particularly where making a speech is involved.

Anyone who knows anything about public speaking knows that one of the first things a speaker needs to do when addressing a crowd is to establish a common bond with his audience. You might think that this would be difficult in the case of a royal person and, furthermore, you might think that said royal person might find it beneath his or her dignity to condescend to the masses.

But on one occasion, I was privileged to watch a royal person carry off this rhetorical feat with an aplomb that delighted his audience and fairly took my breath away.

The royal person in question was H.M. King Harald of Norway. The occasion was a speech he gave at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., sometime in the mid-1990s.

King Harald began his remarks by sharing an account of how the royal family was forced to flee Norway when the Nazis invaded the country during World War II. He, along with his mother and sisters, spent the remainder of the war in Washington. For part of that time, they were the guests of President and Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt at the White House. In fact, King Harald, then eight years old, stood behind President Roosevelt when he was sworn in for his fourth term.

“And so you see,” the King concluded with a twinkle and a lilting Norwegian accent, “I have some standing to call myself a Washingtonian.”

The punch line of the story was greeted with laughter and much warm applause. A touch of royal courtesy had conquered the crowd at a stroke.

Newspaper articles do not normally bring tears to my eyes, but last Sunday one did.

I was in Boca Raton, Florida and noticed a story in the Sun-Sentinel about two teenage boys from Northern Ireland who were spending a month with a local family. What made this event notable was that one of the boys, Owen Carey, was Catholic, and the other, Lee Brunt, was Protestant.

Given the decades of sectarian strife in Northern Ireland, Owen and Lee had little chance of becoming friends back home. But then both boys were enrolled in the Children’s Friendship Project of Northern Ireland (CFPNI), an organization that for 20 years has waged a quiet crusade for peace by bringing Catholic and Protestant youths together on neutral ground.

The nonprofit group pays the teens’ air fares to the United States. Participating American families assume the costs of hosting them while they are here. Since 1987, CFPNI has brought together more than 2,500 Catholic and Protestant teens and their families.

The program is designed to break down ancient prejudices by seeing that the teens interact as much as possible. Among other requirements, they must share a bedroom during their visit with their host American family, and each must attend at least one service at a church of the other’s faith. Thus, the Sun-Sentinel story featured a picture of Owen and Lee attending St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church of Boca Raton, the parish church of their American hosts. Neither boy had attended the other’s church before, and each was rather surprised to find how little difference there was between the two.

A visit to CFPNI’s web site (www.cfpni.org) told me more about the program. Participants are between 15 and 17. Coordinators in Northern Ireland interview and screen applicants based on personal references and written essays. Those selected are paired together based on their geographic proximity, so that they may continue their friendships when they return home. They and their families agree to participate in pre and post cross-cultural activities. The hope is that as the teens become friends, the mutual understanding and goodwill that they generate will spread to their families and neighbors.

Does the program work? The web site reprints some very moving testimonials that participants have written about their experiences. Some even wrote poems. One poem in particular brought tears to my eyes all over again. It began:

Here I am today
with friends I never knew,
trying to make amends
for things we ourselves didn't do.

Perhaps it is only by innocent boys like Owen and Lee “trying to make amends for things they didn’t do” that the recurring cycle of hatred and violence in Northern Ireland can be broken at last. It is at least a good start.

All of us have heard the expression, “Do I have to draw you a picture?”

For speechwriters, the answer is an emphatic “Yes!”

The ear processes information more slowly than the eye. Accordingly, drawing a picture with words will often help the audience to grasp the message that the speaker is trying to convey.

I’ll give you a notable example. One of the most famous remarks associated with President Franklin Roosevelt is, “I hate war.”

This quotation is accurate. It comes from a speech that President Roosevelt gave at Chautauqua, New York in 1936. But it is taken out of context. It is actually the last sentence of a paragraph in which President Roosevelt draws an unforgettable word-picture of the horrors of modern warfare.

The full paragraph reads as follows:

I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen 200 limping, exhausted men come out of line – the survivors of a regiment of 1,000 that went forward 48 hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.

Simply saying, “I hate war” would have been a catch phrase. For FDR, who never served in uniform, it would have been a dangerous catch phrase, since it might have exposed him to ridicule.

But Roosevelt drew on what he saw in France with his own eyes when he visited the front lines as Assistant Secretary of the Navy after the U.S. entered World War I. Thus, while he was never a combatant (his requests to serve were vetoed by Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels and President Woodrow Wilson) he saw the misery of war first-hand, and bore eloquent witness to what he saw.

After the word-picture he drew from his own experience, no one could doubt that his assertion, “I hate war”, came from the depths of his heart.

Columnist John Fund had a piece in today’s Wall Street Journal about Reagan aide Mike Deaver, who died last Saturday of pancreatic cancer. At least, the piece was nominally about Mike Deaver. Most of it dealt with how Fund first encountered Ronald Reagan when he was a high school student and Reagan was Governor of California.

Deaver and another aide had cooked up an idea for a half-hour weekly TV series, “The Governor and the Students.” The format was a sort of news conference in which a panel of high school students would ask the governor questions about state and national issues.

Deaver’s rationale for the series was that it would show Regan interacting with young people –- but they would be young people who still lived at home with their parents, who had not yet been radicalized by liberal professors and who still showed at least some respect for their elders.

On the last of these shows, one student asked Mr. Reagan how he prepared his speeches.

Mr. Fund describes what happened next:

“A beaming Reagan sat down and proceeded to explain how he would cram quotes and articles citations on 4-by-6 index cards that he color-coded by issue category. He showed us some of the cards and explained that he could vary their order and selection to create a completely fresh speech from old material. Finally, Reagan had to leave for his next appointment. Deaver turned around as he left with the governor and told us we had just been give n a valuable gift by a master and we should remember it. I did. To this day, I still use Reagan's basic method when preparing my own speeches.”

Reagan was not unique in this approach to crafting speeches. Historian Douglas Wilson says that many of Abraham Lincoln’s closest associates attest to the fact that when Lincoln had a speech coming up, he would make notes on scraps of paper as ideas occurred to him, and then arrange those scraps into a formal speech.

I don’t mean to class myself with such distinguished company, but I do the same thing myself. There’s really nothing remarkable about this technique. For most writers, our subconscious does a lot of our writing for us. That’s the easy part. The hard part is when we have to take these random jottings and fit them together into a coherent whole.

Eugene Finerman, my friend and fellow-blogger, reminds us that today is the anniversary of the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, where King Richard III was killed by his rival for the English crown, Henry Tudor, thereafter Henry VII.

Most people, if they know anything about Richard III, know him as the malevolent hunchback that Shakespeare depicted in his historical tragedy of the same name. But for years, Richard has had a small, devoted and vocal band of supporters who insist that the poor man was cruelly libeled. In particular, they insist that he never committed the crime for which he is most notorious, the murder of his nephews -- the little princes in the Tower.

Eugene gives a typically magisterial summary of the case on Richard's behalf. It may be viewed at http://finermanworks.com/your_rda_of_irony/2007/08/22/the-karl-roves-of-tudor-england/You

For my reply, see below. For dedicated history buffs like the two of us, the Wars of the Roses never really ended.

Eugene –-

Your latest post reminds me of a young man who was once seen picketing a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard III. He carried a sign that read, “SHAKESPEARE WAS A TUDOR FINK!”

No doubt he was. But that doesn’t clear Richard III of the charge that he murdered his nephews.

Richard’s apologists likewise discount Sir Thomas More’s biography of Richard as “Tudor propaganda” –- despite the fact that More never finished it, and it was never published in his lifetime. Moreover, although More’s account admittedly contains some inaccuracies, More was both a brilliant lawyer and scholar and was later canonized by the Catholic church. So his assessment of Richard cannot be dismissed out of hand.

You say that Richard had no need to dispose of his nephews because Parliament had already declared them illegitimate. That was a mere technicality, as Henry VIII demonstrated by the ease with which he legitimatized and de-legitimized his own offspring. While the princes in the Tower remained alive, they were a focus for opposition to Richard, and he knew it.

What is indisputable is that the princes were confined to the Tower by Richard in 1483 and they were never seen alive again. Could the Duke of Buckingham have killed the princes on his own initiative as you suggest? It’s possible, but it’s unlikely that anyone but Richard himself would have dared to take such a step. Yes, it was a brutal age, but murdering innocent children shocked people’s sensibilities, even then. The Feast of the Holy Innocents (commemorating the innocent children slain by King Herod in an effort to kill the baby Jesus) was a popular devotion in medieval England.

That the princes were dead when Henry Tudor landed in England in 1485 to claim the crown may be safely assumed. Had they been alive, all Richard had to do was to produce them in public, because either of them (“illegitimate” or not) had a better claim to the throne than did Henry. Henry’s campaign would have collapsed like a pricked balloon.

You point out that when Henry Tudor ascended the throne as Henry VII, he had Parliament issue a list of Richard’s crimes, and that this list does not specifically mention the murder of the princes. That is true, although it does charge Richard with “the shedding of innocents’ blood” –- which was perhaps an oblique reference to the boys in the Tower.

Why didn’t Henry VII trumpet the murder of the princes as one of Richard’s blackest crimes? Well, as it happened, there was another young innocent in the Tower at the time: 10-year-old Edward, Earl of Warwick. Edward was also Richard’s nephew, the son of his older brother, the Duke of Clarence, who was famously drowned in the butt of malmsey. Richard III had named Edward as his heir after the death of his son in 1484. So Henry VII had good reason not to create public sympathy for poor little princes unjustly imprisoned in the Tower. Edward was reported to be too simple-minded to plot against Henry, but Henry had him beheaded in 1499 after Perkin Warbeck’s uprising, just to make sure.

Then there’s the question as to why the Queen Mother (Queen Elizabeth, widow of Edward IV and mother of the murdered princes), should have been imprisoned in 1487 for being a supporter of Richard III. Remember that Queen Elizabeth had a daughter, also named Elizabeth. When Richard’s wife, Anne Neville, was dying, rumors circulated that Richard wanted to marry the younger Elizabeth in order to strengthen his claim to the throne. Some sources say that Queen Elizabeth was behind these rumors, notwithstanding that her daughter was Richard’s niece and the marriage would have been incestuous.

Richard’s apologists have claimed that Queen Elizabeth’s purported connivance at this bizarre union “proves” that Richard was innocent of the murder of his nephews, because Queen Elizabeth would never have let the murderer of her sons marry her daughter. Unfortunately for that argument, Queen Elizabeth’s connivance can also taken as proof that the boys were dead. If the boys were alive, she would have had no interest in strengthening Richard’s grip on the throne. But if they were dead, then her only hope of holding on to even a scrap of power was by making her daughter queen. Eventually, she did just that by marrying the girl to Henry VII after he killed Richard at the Battle of Bosworth.

Queen Elizabeth was probably imprisoned because she was a nasty mother-in-law and an incorrigible plotter to boot. The fact that she was widely believed to have dabbled in witchcraft suggests that she was very unpleasant to have around.

For a useful antidote to pro-Richard propaganda, see Richard III: England’s Black Legend by Desmond Seward.

Cordially,

Hal

My last post reminded me of Looking for Richard, a brilliant 1996 documentary film about making Shakespeare’s Richard III intelligible and enjoyable for a modern audience.

Co-written by and starring Al Pacino, who also directed, Looking for Richard takes us behind the scenes to watch Pacino and his fellow players –- Alec Baldwin, Aidan Quinn, Kevin Spacey, Winona Ryder and others –- analyze the play and its characters and find creative ways of bringing a Renaissance tragedy to life. It’s a fascinating glimpse of actors at work.

It’s also an education on the history behind the play and the life and work of Shakespeare. The film includes interviews with such famous interpreters of the Bard as Sir John Gielgud, Kenneth Branagh and Vanessa Redgrave.

My own favorite moment in the film is when one of Pacino’s colleagues declares in exasperation, “People don’t talk in iambic pentameter!” Pacino makes a shrewd face and replies, “They don’t talk in rap, either.”

Pacino’s point is that the actors have to tune the ears of the audience to appreciate Shakespeare’s poetry, just as rappers have to educate audiences to respond to their own rhythms.

The film includes crucial scenes from the play, and the excepts are tantalizing enough to make anyone who doesn’t know Richard III already want to see a whole production uncut.

The Summer 2007 issue of the Claremont Review of Books contains an excellent review of American Speeches, a two-volume collection of American political rhetoric from the Library of America. The review was penned by Diana Schaub, chairman of the department of political science at Loyola College in Maryland, and it is most illuminating.

As a speechwriter, I was particularly pleased by Professor Shaub’s contention that bullet points have undermined the quality of American rhetoric. As proof, she cites the following passage from President Lyndon Johnson’s Special Message to Congress of March 15, 1965:

I want to be the President who educated young children to the wonders of their world. I want to be the President who helped to feed the hungry and to prepare them to be taxpayers instead of taxeaters.

I want to be the President who helped to end war among the brothers of this earth.

To which Professor Schaub comments, acidly: “You could play pick-up-sticks with that collection of indistinguishable banalities.”

Indeed you could, and that’s the whole problem. But Professor Schaub is just warming to her theme. She continues:

“Hierarchy may be antithetical to democracy, but it is essential to logic. The replacement of paragraphs with bullet-points indicates the democratization or leveling or atomization of logic. The equality of all sentences destroys the connectedness of thought. This scattershot technique of contemporary speechmaking can bowl you over, if the speaker has sufficient force of personality, but it can't pierce your mind or heart, and it certainly can't do it as written rather than spoken. Like Shakespeare's plays, Lincoln's speeches are as powerful in the study as on the stage.”

Professor Schaub cites Lincoln’s first inaugural address as an example of rhetoric driven by logic. It’s a good choice. In particular, the penultimate paragraph of Lincoln’s first inaugural shows the power of Lincoln’s logic.

“In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen,” says Lincoln, “and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.”

This is the language of a lawyer framing a case. It’s like a syllogism.

A syllogism, you may recall, is a statement of logical relationship. It has three parts: a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion –- which is the logical consequence of the major and minor premise.

For example:
Major premise: All men are mortal.
Minor premise: Socrates is a man
Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.

Notice, that if you accept the premises of a syllogism, you have to accept the conclusion. So lawyers like to cast their arguments in the form of a syllogism. That way, the only way opposing counsel can attack their argument is by attacking their premises.

Lincoln is not making a formal syllogism, but he’s making a syllogistic type of argument:
Major premise: The government will not make war on the secessionists.
Minor premise: Only the secessionists can start a war.
Conclusion: If war breaks out, the secessionists started it.

Lincoln does not state the conclusion expressly –- he’s too good a politician for that. But the conclusion is there, whether stated expressly or not. Note also that Lincoln refers to the secessionists as “fellow countrymen.” He’s refusing to recognize the Confederacy as a legitimate government. What Lincoln is doing here is fixing the blame for the war on the secessionists. And he succeeded: Remember who fired the first shot.

Notice also that if you were a lawyer for the South, you couldn’t attack Lincoln’s conclusion. You’d have to attack his premises. You’d have to say, “The government did assail us. Lincoln tried to supply the garrison at Ft. Sumter. He committed the first overt act of war.”

But in the end, Lincoln’s conclusion won the verdict before the bar of history. That’s because his rhetoric was driven by logic and not cobbled together out of bullet points.

The disclosure of Senator Larry Craig’s conviction for lewd conduct in a Minneapolis airport men’s room reminds me of a definition from The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce: Senate, n. A body of elderly gentlemen charged with high duties and misdemeanors.

Senator Craig’s attempt to explain his actions in the aforesaid men’s room as “misconstrued”, his subsequent guilty plea as a “poor decision” and the whole sorry affair as the result of a media “witch hunt” into his sexual orientation is beyond Bierce. Only Mark Twain could do justice to it. And, in fact, he did.

Consider this passage from Twain’s 1873 comic masterpiece, The Gilded Age. Here, the great humorist describes the efforts of another scandal-tainted senator to finesse his way out of a jam:

Yes, the nation was excited, but Senator Dilworthy was calm -- what was left of him after the explosion of the shell. Calm, and up and doing. What did he do first? What would you do first, after you had tomahawked your mother at the breakfast table for putting too much sugar in your coffee? You would "ask for a suspension of public opinion." That is what Senator Dilworthy did. It is the custom. He got the usual amount of suspension … Newspapers and everybody else called him a pious hypocrite, a sleek, oily fraud, a reptile who manipulated temperance movements, prayer meetings, Sunday schools, public charities, missionary enterprises, all for his private benefit.

Senator Craig will probably end up having to make an explanation to the Senate Ethics Committee. Like Senator Dilworthy he, too, will probably receive “the usual amount of suspension.” Yet given the effect that another scandal is going to have on the prospects of the already beleaguered GOP, some of Senator Craig’s Republican colleagues may well wish that they could impose a suspension of another kind.