The Bilerico Project | Daily experiments in LGBTQ

Bil posted yesterday about Mitt Romney's days as a violent bully back in the 60's. The Washington Post had five witnesses who independently verified the story, the Boston Globe has a sixth. The short version is that Romney led others in holding down a kid and cutting off his hair and would shout "atta-girl" at another student who was perceived as gay when he spoke in class, but both articles are worth reading for the whole story.

Romney has several excuses for the whole thing:

• he does not remember the incident (even though six classmates, some of whom sound fairly Republican, all do),
• even though he doesn't remember the incident, he's absolutely sure he didn't do it because the kids were gay since there were no gay kids in the 60's,
• he's had a bunch of kids who also had a bunch of kids, which means that his past is erased or something,
• why can't we talk about stuff that's relevant, like how he stole pensions from workers in Kansas City?
• it's funny, something to laugh about with Brian Kilmeade, and
• he's sorry for any incident that "may have gone too far."

A few years ago I worked at a summer camp for future Bain-esque boys whose b/millionaire parents sent them there to toughen them up. Unlike my fairly middle class upbringing, these kids weren't taught to meticulously follow the rules. Instead, they could do pretty much anything they wanted to do so long as they were tough little men about it, and that included bullying and fighting.

So I don't really have trouble imagining that no one involved in this assault was punished. There's a certain class that sees experiences like these as absolutely necessary for growing up to be a leader in certain sectors, and they're probably right about that. We live in a country that's run by its cruelest, greediest people, and the one thing the cruel and greedy can't stand is the notion that there are people who aren't cruel and greedy.

This is their culture and a lot of folks on the right aren't going to really even get why people would be upset about this. It just shows them that Romney is a natural leader.

On another note, I remember a while back David Axelrod saying it was OK for Obama to suck as a president since voters would see that the Republican alternative was comparatively more terrible. The GOP seems to have taken that as a challenge.