It’s safe to say Larry Craig’s arresting office, Sergeant Dave Karsia, has the worst job in American law enforcement. Roll Call took a gander at the police report:
According to the incident report, Sgt. Dave Karsnia was working as a plainclothes officer on June 11 investigating civilian complaints regarding sexual activity in the men’s public restroom in which Craig was arrested.
Airport police previously had made numerous arrests in the men’s restroom of the Northstar Crossing in the Lindbergh Terminal in connection with sexual activity.
Karsnia entered the bathroom at noon that day and about 13 minutes after taking a seat in a stall, he stated he could see “an older white male with grey hair standing outside my stall.”
The man, who lingered in front of the stall for two minutes, was later identified as Craig.
“I could see Craig look through the crack in the door from his position. Craig would look down at his hands, ‘fidget’ with his fingers, and then look through the crack into my stall again. Craig would repeat this cycle for about two minutes,” the report states.
So this police officer has to sit on public restroom stalls for at least 15 minutes at a time? And because the sting depends on guys like Senator Tappy-Toes leering into their stall, presumably they have to be not fully garbed. I have to imagine that the police officers don’t consider this a peach of an assignment. Do they at least get to catch up on their reading?
From there, you know the rest:
“At 1216 hours, Craig tapped his right foot. I recognized this as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct. Craig tapped his toes several times and moves his foot closer to my foot. I moved my foot up and down slowly. While this was occurring, the male in the stall to my right was still present. I could hear several unknown persons in the restroom that appeared to use the restroom for its intended use. The presence of others did not seem to deter Craig as he moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot which was within my stall area.”
Oddly, Craig has his defenders in the left wing blogosphere. Garance Franke-Ruta, a senior editor for The American Prospect opines:
The original charge in the case seem to have been rightly thrown out by the court. According to Minnesota law, “gross interference with privacy” is basically a peeping Tom statute, and there was no allegation that Sen. Larry Craig was improperly peeping into the stall next to his.
I’m not exactly sure what she’s talking about since the arresting report specifically references Craig looking “through the crack” into the officer’s stall for two minutes. But that’s the beauty of being a staffer for these left wing magazines: Facts don’t matter!
SINCE I READ THE LEFTY BLOGS AND YOU DON’T, I also feel the grim duty to inform you that the left is delighting in what it perceives as right wing hypocrisy for demanding Craig be sent on a slow boat to retirement while David Vitter got a pass. As I said this morning, I don’t think it’s hypocrisy. When it comes to being judgmental, everyone draws the line in a place of their own choosing. Just thank God we’re no longer living in the 1990’s when “judgmental” was a pejorative and people today are free to actually have values and make moral judgments. As one who thinks that if you can’t avoid embarrassments like getting caught with a hooker, the United States Senate probably isn’t the best place for you to work, I’ll still concede that what Craig did was obviously more icky than what Vitter did.
And to paraphrase James Carville, it’s the ickinees, stupid. Mark Foley didn’t even do anything illegal, and I don’t recall any lefties sticking up for him. The vast majority of the American public was understandably uncomfortable with a 50-ish congressman having virtual gay sex with an erstwhile congressional page.
By dint of thousands of years of tradition, seeking out sexual liaisons in a Men’s Room is a lot more, um, exotic, than doing the same with a prostitute of the opposite sex. That’s just the way it is. I don’t think it’s homophobic or hypocritical to take note of that obvious fact.
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