Attempting to reconnect socket fails

[terron]

I'm trying to make something that once it is disconnected will automatically try to reconnect. I'll add some more features in later so it doesn't hammer the server but right now I just want to keep it simple and get that part working. The problem is that when I use sock.close I get an error message of

Bad File Descriptor

and if I either use shutdown or just go straight to reconnecting I get:

Transport endpoint is already connected

This is what I've got right now:

#! /usr/bin/env python
import socket, string
sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
def doconn():
    sock.connect(("localhost", 1234))
def dodiscon():
    sock.close()
    doconn()

doconn()

while (1):
    buffer = sock.recv(1024)
    if not buffer:
        dodiscon()

What am I doing wrong?