..on purpose? :D Or was he just confused about the text language and tune like everyone else?

We've had a lot of very strange politicians over the years. A guy called Hedstrøm, he used to be in local politics (he's actually a dentist, very curious person. Never spoke to him in person, but he gives off this irate aura of a particularly confident weasel) - he suddenly got shifted up on a representative list for some reason - and then the wonder that was my hometown and county ended up voting something like ..20% to his party one year, and they got three representatives to parliament from the districts. One of them showed up obviously tipsy in Parliament several times, the other was so liberal he once voted against his own legislation that he had been submitting with members of his own party. Hedstrøm was maybe the least ridiculous of the three. Like.. the clown that runs around trying to smooth over the mistakes the other ones are making in a circus act.

But he was known for doing these not extremely modest stunts, and then violently defending whatever he may have been doing in the media afterwards. That meeting with nazis was one thing, but he justified it afterwards as well ("they were fresh, Norwegian youth"). Caricatures of him smashing the podium in parliament with a shoe turned up every other week for a year or so. I'm not sure if he actually did that once, or if it's an apocryphal story. And he just never wanted to disavow it ever happened, because he thought it was kind of awesome.. I don't know. One version of it was that he picked up something random near the podium and smashed the edge while speaking several times.

Anyway. So in this case he had been agitating particularly hard against toll-stations for a few weeks around the district (the major issue these people get elected on, only second to "cheaper booze", no immigration (of course), and "lower public charges" (which is a good idea, it's not that, it's just that these guys don't understand that public spending has to be paid for somehow).

So after this particularly convincing speech, he somehow talked himself into standing on the border to Sweden (this is just a couple of kilometers east), and pay for the toll-station charge for each passing car. I really don't get it, but he stood there and handed out 20kr coins for a while, like half an hour and a photo-shoot.

And they got this brilliant full-page colour picture in the local paper. He's standing there in the wind, his comb-over hair fluttering a meter out of his head into the breeze, and he's grinning with his flawless teeth so it reflects the sun all the way down Sponvika bay. Have to admit, he was a lot more fun than the people we have now.

He capitulated from national politics in 2005 when his party had serious difficulty with actually putting up a list of representatives that should be elected. The discussion was around whether to put in people who may or may not have been wrongfully accused of underage rape, for example. That guy got elected. He then speculated the county's funds for running costs on the stockmarket, and then lost the money. He got elected again.

They have another guy who was convicted for punching a guy in the face while out a Saturday evening (this happened while he's in his 30s, at least) who got elected in Trondheim.

And that party has several representatives in the current coalition government. The "punch a brown guy in the face while drunk because cheek!" dude is the "Fishing minister". Before that he was actually the chair of the "justice-committee" (it's a standing committee dealing with all kinds of semi-incidental legal issues for legislation.. not a whole lot you can fuck up here, admittedly) for a while. Another member of that committee, while his party is in government, managed recently to defend vigilante justice groups like Soldiers of Odin.

That penguin-suit woman who got dunked in the Mediterranean sea a while back. Which got Norway on the map for the first time since the Palestinian peace talks, I guess. Where this minister used the opportunity to talk about how asylum seekers is a plague that needs to be stopped, etc. While somehow smuggling in how bathing in a thermo-suit taught her something about how it is to be a "boat-refugee". Yeah, you guessed it - she's from that party too.

Yesterday these guys managed to enact legislation that essentially disavow Norway's commitment to the refugee convention and the UN Charter.

So yes: in Norway, we are in fact best at everything. Including being assholes. *thumbs*