Mr. Craig goes to Washington

If Frank Capra had been directing, the now famous scene in the police station where Sen. Craig and Sgt. Karsnia disagree over what actually happened in the airport restroom would have ended so differently.

Capra would have taken a shot to reveal a high window in the interrogation room, showing how it filled the room with ambient light, a shot he'd take again just as Karsnia asks, "Anything to add?"

"Yes," Craig would have told the policeman in the Capra version. The advancing sun would hit the high window, bathing Craig in a light stream in the classic Capra visual cue for religious experience. "I've lied to you," Craig would continue.  "I don't need to make this flight, just the opposite. This is one that it is very important that I miss."

Karsnia sits back in his chair. There's been a visible change in his perp, once cocky, then panicked, now suddenly serene. "I understand now," Craig continues. "Its all connected. I just never saw it."

Detective Noel Nelson, the third man in the room, shifts uncomfortably in his chair. A few minutes ago this was going to be a slam dunk. Convince the guy that a quick and dirty plea would keep the arrest out of the media and he'd say and do anything. But something was going wrong, horribly wrong. It was written all over the senator's face.

"There's another lie. This is about toe tapping and hand waving, how you think reaching down with my palm up is lewd, but reaching down any other way might not be. This is about you on the public payroll spending your days squatting on a toilet seat that others are waiting for.

"This is about your intimate knowledge of a complex set of rules and cues that you claim mean something but only to men who have sex with men who pick them up in public restrooms. So when you said you don't care about sexual preference, you lied. Are you picking up women for toetapping in singles bars? Or for handwaving? "

Nelson takes a long swig on his coffee to break the silence, then jumps in. "You obviously know a lot about this, senator. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck..."

"Sgt. Karsnia," retorts Craig, "is paid to try to pick men up. Its like the state gives him a duck call, and teaches him the art of duck calling, and puts him in a duck blind, and then you all say this isn't about ducks. What we're arguing about is whether I quacked first or he quacked first. You did tap your foot, didn't you, officer?"

The answer took a while in coming, "I may have raised my foot up and down," he said. Now Nelson really wants to change the subject. He jumps in again, "Senator, don't you have to get back to Washington?"

"No, not any more. I thought I did. I thought Alberto Gonzalez needed my vote so that he could ignore the law and the court, and get the bad guys. Now, I'm wondering if we know who the bad guys really are."

So, in the Capra version, Craig becomes a Democrat. He goes back to Washington and he embraces the GLBT lobby like he's Dennis Kucinich. Not in a gay way, of course, he's already learned how to say the word "wife" with an inflection that simultaneously means trophy and cover story, but growth takes time.

His vote, and the few others we get from Senators tired of mouthing empty words at grieving military families or scared they won't be re-elected unless they start helping the little guy, changes the direction of our country.

The Republican party, scared of a repeat performance, stops using gay people as bogeymen to scare their right wing base, and Sgt. Karsnia (and thousands like him) never sits as gaybait in the air conditioned stall of a public restroom again. He's reassigned to a new unit under the bipartisan infrastructure reconstruction act. He protects structural engineers by redirecting traffic so they can examine the bridges in Minneapolis so that next time we have some warning before they fall down.

But that's the Frank Capra version, and it looks like Scorsese is directing this one.