Right-wingers have responded to the revelations about Mitt Romney’s bullying high school ways in the only way they really can: by denying it has any relevance. Who could be so cruel as to judge a man by his worst behavior in adolescence?
Or, as I saw it sarcastically argued today on the Twitter Machine, “The fact is, boys will be boys. Who among us hasn’t shoved a crippled kid down a flight of stairs?”
Which, of course, points out that while many, if not most, of us have at some point been bullies or bullied, at least none us ever strapped anyone to the roof of our car.
Or led a gang of preppies on a hate-filled sortie to pin a queer kid down on the ground and clip his bleach-gold locks against his will?
Yet, as I said before, that was almost fifty years ago. What matters is not what Romney did then, but what he does today. And, today, he denies any recollection of the event. That’s a character flaw. It doesn’t seem like anyone else that was there that day ever forgot it.
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 identified.
The victim never forgot it.
Sometime in the mid-1990s, David Seed noticed a familiar face at the end of a bar at Chicago O’Hare International Airport.
“Hey, you’re John Lauber,” Seed recalled saying at the start of a brief conversation. Seed, also among those who witnessed the Romney-led incident, had gone on to a career as a teacher and principal. Now he had something to get off his chest.
“I’m sorry that I didn’t do more to help in the situation,” he said.
Lauber paused, then responded, “It was horrible.” He went on to explain how frightened he was during the incident, and acknowledged to Seed, “It’s something I have thought about a lot since then.”
…[Lauber’s] hair thinned as he aged, and in the winter of 2004 he returned to Seattle, the closest thing he had to a base. He died there of liver cancer that December. He kept his hair blond until he died, said his sister Chris. “He never stopped bleaching it.”
Seems like he went to his grave cursing Mitt the Shit.
And Romney doesn’t remember it? That’s a problem.
