He denies it strenuously — so strenuously, in fact, that he’s threatening to sue the St. Petersburg Times for suggesting that any of the orgiastic shenanigans that Mike Tyson recently described to Sports Illustrated could have happened aboard his ship, Summerwind. So just to be clear: This is all soft and unsubstantiated and merely alleged.

In that same spirit, I hereby allege that most Americans desperately want to party with Jeff Greene.

[J]ust as Greene was gaining momentum against U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek in a race for the Democratic nomination, Tyson went and told Sports Illustrated about that summer when he spent so much time with Greene. Tyson, who was best man at Greene’s 2007 wedding, makes that period of his life sound more like the Love Boat:

“I was in St. Tropez, in the South of France. In Ibiza, Spain. I was in Monte Carlo. I was in the Ukraine, Russia, all those places, for three months. From Russia I went to Lisbon, Portgual, from Portugal I went to Amsterdam. In Amsterdam I met this drug dealer, right? And he sees that I like getting high, and he wants to be my buddy, right? This guy goes and gets me a big rock of cocaine. So pretty soon I got a party going on. I got everything: I got these rugby players. I got these naked girls, I got all these … everything’s going on in the room. Plus I also had this girl with me that I picked up in Romania. But then [the dealer he met in Amsterdam] saw how much of a mess I was. He came in and kicked everybody out of my room! All the nude people, all the people having sex. He said, ‘I feel so bad I ever gave him that stuff,’ ” Tyson said in an interviewed published in July…

No, Greene said, he didn’t go to Amsterdam with Tyson, who was only on board about a month. No, he didn’t see any drug-taking or take any drugs himself.

“I don’t know what Mike Tyson did when I was not with him, but Summerwind has a zero tolerance for drugs or any illegal activity,” Greene told the St. Petersburg Times, noting that he has paid for drug rehab for Tyson.

Follow the link for conflicting reports from former crew members, some of whom claim they never saw anything untowards happening onboard the ship or with Greene himself and others of whom report “Naked, drunken people everywhere!” Assuming any of it is true, I’m not sure why he’s running away from it. This gives him a money campaign slogan: “Jeff Greene 2010 — Because the Senate needs another Kennedy.”

Speaking of the Senate, Jim Geraghty has me coming around to the idea that Greene upsetting Kendrick Meek in the Democratic primary might not be the worst thing in the world. Granted, it’s probably going to push a lot of black voters into Crist’s column, but according to a new poll out today, Sunshine Charlies’s approval rating (44 percent) is now the lowest that any Florida governor has seen in 16 years. He’s very vulnerable, in other words, and like Geraghty says, if Greene wins the primary he’ll have both the incentive and the (nearly unlimited) resources to run ads tearing Crist to shreds from now until November. Looking forward to it!