WDTY's Sly confronts Wisconsin legislator Brett Hulsey about the beach incident involving 3 children...

... which led to a charge of disorderly conduct, to which he pled "no contest."

Though both Sly and Hulsey are Madison lefties — click the tags below — Sly does a tough interview, with the refrain: People are "creeped out."

Hulsey has some stock phrases he repeats: it was "a potentially dangerous situation" (a boy was splashing 2 "little girls"), he'd been out in the "extreme heat" and wanted to "cool off,"  the splashing was "wild," "I admit I made a mistake," he "startled" the boy, in "a foot of water," the police officers "didn't write down a word" of his story, and he was "flabbergasted" that they wrote him a ticket. He tries to frame the story in terms of police abuse, and Sly practically shouts him down: Then why did you plead no contest?!

Hulsey's voice sounds whiny and sporadically spikes to a high pitch. He hedges about whether he flipped the boy's innertube over, but seems to concede it in the end.

Hulsey keeps saying he was not taking photographs of the children but of the sunset, but here's the location of the beach. Would that be a sunset vantage point on July 4th? The police report doesn't seem to have even the approximate time of the incident [says the incident took place at 7:24 PM. Sunset occurred at 8:40 PM. Would children be playing by themselves in the lake at that hour? [ADDED: It wasn't 8:40, but more than an hour before sunset. I'm still surprised that children would be allowed to swim in the lake at that time (or really anytime) without closer supervision.]

(Here's the Isthmus article that Sly refers to. Here's our discussion a few days ago about the incident.)

Hulsey is the Democratic candidate for the Wisconsin state assembly — in my district. The incident occurred on July 4th, but the first we heard of the story was when the Isthmus story came out on August 29th. The primary was August 14th, and Hulsey is, conveniently, unopposed in the general election. Nice timing.

ADDED: Rereading the police report, I get the impression that Hulsey was trying to play with the children. The children said that Hulsey had his "arms up off to his sides and his mouth was wide open but making no sound" — as if he was "trying to sneak up" on the boy. According to the report, "Brett then 'shocked' [the boy] out of his inflatable so that he fell into the water." His hands touched the inflatable and the boy, and the man and the boy started splashing each other, with Hulsey saying "something to the effect of 'do you want to have a splash fight with me?'"

That sounds like a man trying to play with kids. The boy was "happy" at first, but soon felt "confused," according to one of the girls (as reported by the police), and the girl said that made her feel "strange" because she "didn't really know what he could do."

Now, that sounds awkward, and you can think about how creepy it is and whether you'd call the police if your kids told you about a man doing that (and then taking photographs). But here's the thing: If he was trying to play, why doesn't he say that? Why does he say over and over that he was dealing with "a potentially dangerous situation"?