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.