Craig news confounding in any nation

I‘m sure you recognize that feeling of “wow, wait a minute, what the heck was that?” that hits your gut when your worlds collide. It’s how you feel when you run into your boss on the beach and he’s wearing nothing but a purple Speedo and flip-flops, instead of his usual Mayor Hession-style dark blue suit getup.

Not that this has ever happened to me.

But sitting in my mom’s kitchen in Copenhagen, Denmark, early one morning I suffered one of the biggest world collisions I’ve ever experienced, just like that, while listening to the morning news on the radio.

I’d gotten up just in time to hear Sen. Larry Craig say, “I am not gay; I never have been gay,” in solid English, followed by the Danish radio reporter quipping, “As if that has anything to do with it.”

Craig’s desperate attempt to un-gay himself fell completely flat when the broadcast continued with a quote in which Craig called then-President Bill Clinton a “nasty, bad, naughty boy” for fooling around with Monica Lewinsky.

By then, even my mom was laughing out loud.

Yes, Craig and his bathroom tap dance made headlines in the old country, spawning some interesting conversations on my last vacation day.

“Why is it always the most conservative and religious ones this happens to?” my mom wanted to know.

There are many theories – but I hesitate to pick one.

Perhaps closeted conservatives are just hopelessly bad at concealing their dual lives, as compared to their liberal counterparts. Or maybe there are a higher number of conservative, closeted gay men, so statistically they are more likely to get outed.

“What is wrong with Americans? This seems to happen all the time,” a Danish friend e-mailed me later in the day.

Good point. I mean, there are plenty of European politicians who aren’t exactly poster children for the nuclear family and the holy sanctimony of marriage, but they rarely run on a moral agenda.

I simply don’t understand why so many Republicans continue to pursue the gay-hating agenda.

By now, even a junior spin doctor should be able to figure out that the holier-than-thou platform backfires in frequent and unexpected ways and most often when your pants are down, and it’s not a physician who’s snapping on the latex gloves.

“Why do people care what he does on his private time?” a Danish friend, living in Spokane wanted to know.

“As long as he doesn’t do anything illegal, it shouldn’t matter.”

Well, yes it should.

Because preaching one way and living another makes you a hypocrite, and to me that’s an especially nasty, bad, naughty thing to do when it gets you elected to live the fat life, as paid for by voters who actually believed at least some of what you told them about your personal belief systems.

Sheesh – can’t leave the country for a few weeks without coming back to a huge mess.

In Scandinavian news, the Swedes almost managed to initiate a new Muhammad cartoon crisis after a newspaper published an artist’s rendering of the prophet as a dog. It seems like protests had died out by the weekend, after several other papers published the same drawing.

And I’d barely left Denmark before eight were arrested for terrorism-related activity. One is accused of producing the unstable explosive TATP – also known as the Mother of Satan – in his apartment in a residential neighborhood.

News reports identify the eight men as part of a “radical Muslim terror cell,” but there’s not a word about whether they are gay or solicit anonymous sex in public restrooms.

One thing is certain: News-wise, there’s no way a fumbling Larry Craig can compete with a story like that, and at the end of the day, that’s a good thing.