Will the Bush Administration Assassinate Larry Craig?

It looks like Larry Craig might be deciding to leave some wiggle room in his resignation from the Senate which means that the "Larry Craig Sex Scandal Show" might still be running as Gen. Petraeus pulls into Washington for his "Save the Surge" Campaign.

So, what will the Bush administration do about it?

The Larry Craig scandal serves as a constant reminder of the incompetence and hypocrisy of the Bush administration and Republican leadership at what everyone views as a crucial moment in the Iraq War.

As a result, a Bush administration assassination plot to eliminate Craig can't be ruled out.

There are lots of reasons why is this the case?

One can't say that the Bush administration respects human life. After 9-11, Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff David Addington was mooning over the prospect of one more terrorist bomb making it possible to eliminate the FISA restrictions on administration wiretapping altogether.

Lovely guy. But if Addington was hoping for more terrorist attacks on American soil, what's to keep him from advocating murder on American soil?

What about respect for the law?

If there's anything that's obvious in the world, it's that the Bush administration has no respect for any body of law. Not only did the Bush administration violate American and/or international law to torture terror suspects in American facilities, send terror suspects to other countries to be tortured, and engage in warrantless wiretapping, but they gloried in it.

If the Bush administration has no concern about torturing and killing foreigners, what about the various taboos on official murder and political assassination in the United States.

Perhaps those taboos would hold in the case of Larry Craig, but I don't see any reason why anyone would consider that to be a sure thing. Here's an example of a Karl Rove campaign tactic from an Alabama judicial race.

"We were trying to counter the positives from that ad," a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. "It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information," the staffer went on. "That was a major device we used for the transmission of this stuff. The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that's one of the ways that Karl got the information out—he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out." This would create the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the state. "What Rove does," says Joe Perkins, "is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin', tobacco-chewin', pickup-drivin' kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard to take."

A lot of Karl Rove's repulsion as a political operative lies in his willingness to break social taboos about truth-telling, bigotry-mongering, and attempting to personally destroy people in order to pursue his political objectives. Of course, Rove himself has resigned, but all of his proteges have been trained in the same school of political repulsion.

If that's the case, one wonders by what moral principle, strategic conviction, or tactical consideration the Rove disciples in the White House political operation would stop short of killing someone who was upsetting their plans.

I'm not saying that the White House is going to assassinate Craig, but I can't honestly think of any principle or consideration that would prevent them from doing so.

Maybe Larry Craig should peak over his shoulder once in a while.