I'm all about fringe.
Posted on 05/10/2012 12:10:38 PM PDT by presidio9
There may be a good reason voters can’t get a good bead on Mitt Romney. And it may be because the real Romney has a troubled, sadistic history. High School classmates of Romney recall an incident that’s disturbing to its core. Romney, then a popular senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School in Michigan, disapproved of classmate John Lauber’s long, blond locks, which Romney allegedly took as a clue that Lauber was a homosexual. So Romney assembled a posse of bullies and held the boy down and brutally chopped off his hair.
“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.
A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.
The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another. Four of them — Friedemann, now a dentist; Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer; Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor; and David Seed, a retired principal — spoke on the record. Another former student who witnessed the incident asked not to be named. The men have differing political affiliations, although they mostly lean Democratic. Buford volunteered for Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008. Seed, a registered independent, has served as a Republican county chairman in Michigan. All of them said that politics in no way colored their recollections.
Today, Romney’s actions would be considered a hate crime. The assault itself is a felony.
So is Mitt Romney sorry for his actions 47 years ago? Nope, unlike five of his classmates, the Republican presidential candidate has no recollection of assaulting Lauber. His campaign team put out this statement:
… the former Massachusetts governor has no recollection of the incident.
Why would Mitt Romney not remember straddling another boy and savagely cutting off his hair? Because the event meant nothing to Romney. Lauber was beneath his contempt. He wasn’t human to the young Romney.
But won’t voters find it disturbing is that five classmates vividly recall the event, but Romney doesn’t? Uh oh, time for shake the Romney Etch-A-Sketch…. Oh that brutal attack? It appears Mitt does remember assaulting Lauber, but…
I certainly don’t believe that I thought the fellow was homosexual. That was the furthest thing from our minds back in the 1960s.
And he still hasn’t apologized.
Also Romney is trying to claim that rampant homophobia didn’t exist in the 1960s? Perhaps that’s why it was so easy for homosexual men to come out back then. You better try again Mitt, you’re getting caught in yet another deep, disturbing lie.
Romney’s actions may be decades old, but they highlight a current problem among the Republican Party: Bullying is an acceptable form of punishment to quell dissent and non-conformity. From Ray Kelly’s spying on Muslims and brutal treatment of peaceful Occupy Wall Street voters to Rush Limbaugh’s labeling of independent women as “feminazis,” “sluts,” and “prostitutes,” the GOP has bcome vile, mean, and intolerant at its core.
Lauber died in 2004, so it is too late for Mitt Romney to apologize to him, but it doesn’t mean he shouldn’t apologize to the public for his actions. As a bullied child myself, I find Romney’s actions in 1965 to be beyond contempt. The emotional scars I bear from the bullying and assaults I had to endure during my teenage years still haunt me.I remember my attackers gleeful faces as they heckled and assaulted me. I remember the names they called me, I remember feeling the spit on my cheek, I remember the punches they threw, I remember the helplessness I felt. There are millions of people like me, we were the “retards,” the “fags,” the “geeks,” and the “losers.” You see, it doesn’t matter to us whether Lauber was gay or not. It also doesn’t matter that Romney didn’t attack him for being gay. What matters is that Lauber was physically assaulted for being different, for being subhuman, to being on a lower social stratus than a scion of wealth and affluence.
I have never received an apologies from the bullies that made my life hell. Today, one of them even denies the events ever happened. To me, this only heightens my contempt for bullies; when caught, they feel it’s acceptable for them to dismiss the event. It either didn’t occur or didn’t matter. My contempt for bullying has only grown because of this. And now, I have a new-found contempt for Mitt Romney, America’s lead bully. And his denying the significance of such an event is just as despicable as the assault.
So, you are a bully.
Weird that you would think that a person who stands up to the bad guys, and the attackers, are bullies.
When I witness a bar fight, and I see a man pull out a knife, and I jump in to disarm him and stop the fight, am I bullying the knife man, when I see a man hit his wife and I intervene, you think that I am bullying him, stopping Romney and his posse from assaulting this guy, would be bullying them? When I jump on a guy and disarm him as he is going into his kids room to murder him and his mother in a murder/suicide event, that is bullying him?
Protecting victims, is not being a bully, it is protecting people.
What a bully you are. You should apologize. And stop pushing people around, you damned bully.
Forming a posse to hold down a person and cut their hair, is not a prank, it is a full blown assault.
I can imagine what fathers here would think if their son came home from school having been attacked in this manner.
I think the violence of the act would enrage them.
Headline should have read: I'm Barack Obama, and I approve this message.
The only thing despicable about this story is the WaPo sitting on this story, as it was given them some time ago, until Idi Obama could come out of the closet and they could attempt to smear Romney with it as a homo-bashing bully.
I wonder what “Cliff” looks like...
####
Ward, I’m worried about the MrB.
Give a woman an Indian burn or participate in a voluntary game of dodge ball, or overcome her enough to get her on the ground and cut off her hair by force, which one would you prefer trying to defend to a jury in a court room, as harmless, which one would you not want on your record?
Weird, not only do you compare someone attacking an individual to cut off his hair to kids playing dodge ball, but you don’t know how old Mitt Romney was in 1965.
These were military age males, it was 1965 and Mitt was born in 1947.
This would have been considered a real attack in 1965.
I'm all about fringe.
Your posts get weirder, longer, and further afield, I have answered you, I would much rather face a judge for pinching an arm or playing in a voluntary dodge ball game than for attacking someone violently, subduing them with pals, and cutting his hair off, meaning I think your questions in that regard are ridiculous.
Mitt was 17, old enough to enlist, although no male in his direct line has ever done so, even the draft can’t catch them.
You are smoking pot if you think that an attack of this nature was not a serious thing in 1965, I don’t know if you were still in high school yourself, or already out, but if you have some vision that such a thing was laughed off as an innocent prank, then you are wrong. My guess is that the victim kid kept it as quiet as possible.
Romney apologized for it, and claimed that he can’t remember it, a normal person would be stunned and outraged that it could even be thought possible for them to have been like that, they would not claim being unable to remember if they were doing that kind of thing or not. No one forgets doing that kind of violence.
When were your high school days?
No, go back over five years of my posts and many other freepers regarding Romney and his lines unbroken record of not serving us in the service, we never meant that literally no man with the name of Romney had ever been in the military or that no one in his vast Mormon extended family had not possibly been in the service, your inability to interpret reality and to not see the obvious intent of a post, and to cling to it angrily it for weeks or months or however long it has been, is truly bizarre, and is personalizing it.
I can see that you are personally engaged here and are dragging other threads and other topics onto this thread, that is against FR policy.
The weirdness in your posts on this thread are now explained, you are a grudge poster carrying personal baggage around FR and devoted to Romney.
You have issues friend, my guess is that you have been bully bait for much of your life, and that is why you are accepting of Mitt’s violent bullying.
...we never meant that literally no man with the name of Romney had ever been in the military...
Your words, in context, state otherwise. Had not another challenge your falsehoods, you would still be clinging to these falsehoods.
No, go back over five years of my posts and many other freepers regarding Romney
Unlike you, who has an really unhealthy obsession(FIVE YEARS?) with all things Romney and Mormons, I only recently started to post on Romney/Mormon threads. (Really FIVE YEARS? I would be EMBRASSASSED to PUBLICLY ADMIT I had a MAN CRUSH for Romney for FIVE YEARS.)
I started “defending” Romney on political grounds when it became apparent to all (well, to all who still have contact with reality) that the election will be between Obama the leftist radical, or Romney who at least gives conservatives hope, however slight.
As for "personally engaged" and "a grudge poster carrying personal baggage"
Look in the mirror, buddy!
Look in the mirror!
I'm (hahaha)a mere rank amateur (hahaahaa) compared to you and your obsession.(hahahaa) Mr. Big Touppff Texan and his "Sheepdog!!!! (hahaha)
After this election, I will leave all this behind and continue my life.
You, however will continue your mad rantings about Mormonism and man crush for Romney(haahaa)for another five years or until the Secret Service or men in white put you into a padded cell for your own protection.
But keep waiting for that "prefect Christian candidate of your fantasy world, Obama appreciates your patience.
Wow, for you to be so angry and bitter at a stranger on an internet forum and so deeply invested in such personal emotional rage toward me, as your post displays, shows that you need to step back a little and not think that you are meeting deep personal enemies here.
Maybe you need to try and find something else to do for a while before you explode, remember that Romney is merely a man, and that you are on a conservative site, where the owner, and many conservatives, are not blind to his history and politics.
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