Tucker Carlson Luridly Describes Hate Crime

This is stunning. Tucker Carlson, he of the erstwhile bowtie, explains that when he was once cruised in a public bathroom, he responded by getting a friend and beating the fag up.

CARLSON: Let me -- let me put it this way. Whether he's gay or not actually is not our business, and I do think it's indefensible that the newspaper in Idaho spent a year interviewing 300 people to answer the question, Is he gay? That's none of your business. Having sex in a public men's room is outrageous. It's also really common. I've been bothered in men's rooms. I think people who do -

SCARBOROUGH: Really?

CARLSON: Yeah, I have. You know what, Let me just say.

SCARBOROUGH: Wait, hold on a second. Dan, hold on a second. I don't mean to take over, but have you been bothered in public restrooms, Dan? Because I know I haven't.

CARLSON: I have. I've been bothered in Georgetown Park. When I was in high school.

ABRAMS: Really?

CARLSON: Yes.

SCARBOROUGH: Wow.

CARLSON: And let me just say, I think --

SCARBOROUGH: That's something.

CARLSON: -- people should knock that off. I'm not anti-gay in the slightest, but that's really common, and the gay rights groups ought to disavow that kind of crap because, you know, that actually does bother people who didn't ask for being bothered [...]

CARLSON: But it's also -- but it's evidence, in Larry Craig's case -- I mean, you know, you just watch the press conference, and you see a man who's not in possession of himself. I mean, there's something -- you know, I'm not a shrink, but there's clearly something wrong with Larry Craig. He appeared to believe it. This is a guy who's been accused repeatedly over the years of soliciting sex from men in bathrooms. So the chances that he's arrested for the same thing accidentally --

ABRAMS: Right, right, right.

CARLSON: What, he's the unluckiest man and he's Job?

SCARBOROUGH: Hey, Tucker?

CARLSON: You know what I mean? It's insane!

SCARBOROUGH: Was he the guy in Georgetown, Tucker?

CARLSON: No, actually. I got that -- my point is -- let me just say --

ABRAMS: Tucker, what did you do, by the way? What did you do when he did that? We got to know.

CARLSON: I went back with someone I knew and grabbed the guy by the -- you know, and grabbed him, and -- and --

ABRAMS: And did what?

CARLSON: Hit him against the stall with his head, actually!

[laughter]

CARLSON: And then the cops came and arrested him. But let me say that I'm the least anti-gay right-winger you'll ever meet --

[laughter]

I guess the cops missed the hate crime part, just the terrible damage to Tucker's honor. Media Matters has the whole transcript. Is MSNBC going to do anything about one of their on-air personalities admitting to beating up a gay man?

I don't chastise Larry Craig because he's gay, it's because he's a hypocrite. And I question the legality of the arrest to begin with, given the circumstances. But what is unequivocal is that responding to solicitation by bashing the guy's skull against a door is a hate crime. Absolutely. What's the statute of limitations here? Can I make a citizen's arrest?

UPDATE: Digby makes a good point. How exactly did Carlson know he was being cruised?

Furthermore, if Carlson and his high school pal, whom he allegedly left the bathroom to find and then came back to assault this gay man, did this as a result of the guy "tapping his feet" on the floor and sliding his foot under the stall divider, as Larry Craig admitted to doing, then Tuckie knows a hell of a lot more about gay cruising signals that the average straight fellow. I asked my husband if he would have had a clue what it meant if someone did that and he didn't know what I was talking about.

When the "signals" are that obscure, only the people who are in on the code know what's going on. Everyone else just thinks it's some guy sliding his foot around weirdly and tapping his toes while he sits on the toilet and they don't respond. The guy moves on to someone who knows the code and responds that they are interested.

In other words, if Tucker is picking up these signals as a gay come on, then he's far more clued in to the gay world than any straight guy, except maybe a cop, would normally be. We don't know, of course, what really happened to Tucker that day when he was "bothered" in the men's room. Perhaps it was really aggressively sexual and traumatizing. But he didn't make any distinctions and made the case that he'd been a victim of someone like Craig, so Craig's behavior is all we really have to go on.

UPDATE II: Tucker defends himself by telling a completely different story:

Let me be clear about an incident I referred to on MSNBC last night: In the mid-1980s, while I was a high school student, a man physically grabbed me in a men's room in Washington, DC. I yelled, pulled away from him and ran out of the room. Twenty-five minutes later, a friend of mine and I returned to the men's room. The man was still there, presumably waiting to do to someone else what he had done to me. My friend and I seized the man and held him until a security guard arrived.

Several bloggers have characterized this is a sort of gay bashing. That's absurd, and an insult to anybody who has fought back against an unsolicited sexual attack. I wasn't angry with the man because he was gay. I was angry because he assaulted me.

That's simply a totally different story. In this one, a man assaulted him and he seized him for the cops after getting help. In the first one, someone "bothered" him, he got a friend, and bashed his head against a door. Which is it?