Mitt Romney - A school bully with a strong streak of cruelty
BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. — Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.
“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.
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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.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mitt-romneys-prep-school-classmates-recall-pranks-but-also-troubling-incidents/2012/05/10/gIQA3WOKFU_story.html
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I just read this story to a friend and he shook his head and said, "What kind of a name is 'Mitt' anyway?" Then he started playing with it: "Mitch? Mitchell? No. Mitt. Hm. Admit, omit..."--bingo!
Omit Romney!
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I went roaming and found out that Romney's name is actually "Willard Mitt Romney" and he was named after the Marriott Hotels' billionaire, J. Willard Marriott, a friend of his father. The "Mitt" apparently came from his father's cousin Milton "Mitt" Romney, a quarterback for the Chicago Bears (1920s).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitt_Romney
Presumably he or his family/political groomers picked out "Mitt" from this stuffy mouthful ("Willard Milton Romney"
for future bumper stickers, unaware that a future leftist friend of Peace Patriot would come up with the clever, "O Mitt Romney!"
The Marriott Hotels, indeed.
I'm 56 but I remember a lot of stuff from high school. And if somebody jobs my memory, I remember everything.
Bake
...why the powers-that-be are sliming Romney. I'm still wondering it about Edwards (--what does he know?). I think this may be the work of our worst ruling power--the Bush Cartel--on behalf of Jeb. They may not think the time is ripe yet for Bush Junta II, and they don't want any other Puke to have "titular leader" power among the Pukes nor of course the White House.
I don't take ANYTHING that the Washington Pciast prints at face value (and I'm even, these days, thinking back and wondering about Watergate--were they really pure-hearts then? did they have dark reasons for wanting Nixon out?) (--was the exposure of Watergate and its coverup a coverup of something else?)
The Pciast, in addition to all of their other journalistic crimes, regularly blackhole REALLY BIG news stories (such as the ES&S/Diebold privatization of our voting systems). So, they could easily have deep-sixed this story, for all its witnesses. Of course, it could be that someone peddled the story around and they didn't want to be "scooped." It also could be that they are trying to GET votes for "O Mitt!" among the yahoos (but doesn't he have a lock on bigot voters already?).
Another possibility is that there is a split on the right side of the Corporate/War Profiteer Rulership, with, say, ES&S/Diebold (far rightwing-connected) and their fascist cabal (Rumsfeld, Cheney, the Kochs, Exxon Mobile--their ilk) wanting to strike now, to finish off U.S. democracy and proceed with the bloody military takeover of the world, and the other Corporate Rulers (think, Bush Sr., Leon Panetta, some Corporate/War Profiteer Dems, maybe the military brass--the ones who ousted Rumsfeld) thinking it's best to maintain some illusions, continue this period of "forgetting" and and jump in later, when all is "forgotten," for the Final Looting and a more effective, hypocritical transglobal regime, which controls most of the world's oil through wiles and 'little' skirmishes, not all out war.
If there is such a split (call it "O Mitt Now vs Jeb '16" , then the Washington Pciast (in dissing Mitt) may be working for the latter group, of which Leon Panetta seems to be the most visible operative.
Remember that Panetta was a member of the "Old CIA" committee that Bush Sr. assembled--the so-called "Iraq Study Group"--to (my thesis) oust Rumsfeld, stop Rumsfeld/Cheney from nuking Iran ("bad for business" , and possibly to rescue Junior from the CIA's wrath over the outing of their entire WMD counter-proliferation team around the world--and it also put Panetta in place to stop the war between the Pentagon and the CIA that Rumsfeld/Cheney had started and to clean up after Junior on a number of fronts. (Panetta may even have "vetted" Obama on investigation/prosecution of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, and extracted his compliance with "the Deal" that was made to get Cheney/Rumsfeld to exit peacefully.)
This "O Mitt" story makes me uneasy, in other words--little alarm bells going off. I don't care if there were 20 witnesses or a hundred. They could all be bought, "divided and conquered," smeared themselves or simply ignored--or, depending on the importance of the suppression, threatened in various ways, or, one by one picked off (a motorcycle accident here, a mysterious heart attack there). But, with the complete subversion of a free press that we have seen, by our Corporate Rulers, "blackholing" news stories (not investigating( it, not printing it, sometimes printing disinformation as a cover) is one of the less risky propaganda techniques. I don't know how these fascist 'news' organizations get their faxes from the CIA (whether directly or in back alleys) but they all cover the same bullcrap-type of "military-industrial complex"-friendly 'news' stories, in the same way--whether the Associated Pukes or the New York Slimes or Rotters or our capitol's prime lie promulgator, the Washington Pest. (Even the BBC and even the Guardian are guilty of such bullcrap about the popular, highly successful Latin American Left.)
The 'news' from such sources is highly, highly manipulated and it is our obligation as citizens of this benighted democracy to question it and try to figure out what is really going on. That is what I am doing here. I don't doubt the story itself (because there were so many witnesses, and these 'news' organizations do like to maintain a sort of minimal credibility and I would think especially so in a right vs. right power struggle). But I DO question their motives in pursuing a story from frigging 1965 in a boys' school. I'm sorry but teenage boys do rotten things--often very uncharacteristic things--and most grow out of it. I don't think children's activities are "fair game," frankly. We may think that Romney is a bully and a bigot (didn't grow out of it) or is just a panderer to bigots. HE--the adult person--is fair game. His mistakes as a teenager are not. So, why didn't the Pciast say, "Sorry, this is not appropriate"? Hm? Why are they pushing it and making a big deal out of it? They would probably say that the issues of bullying and gay rights are current but I don't think I would believe them if they did. I suspect an ulterior motive.
I have to say that, as a Democrat and an Obama supporter, I read the OP with a certain amount of glee. Bigot caught red-handed. Then I started thinking about it. I don't trust the news organization, at all. This is "below the belt" politics. (An awful lot of us would be disqualified from public office if some of our activities as teenagers were known. That's why they seal juvenile records. It's not fair to judge an adult by his or her worst teenage actions.) WHY are they pushing this?
I just thought of another possible motive. If Romney has been "cut loose" by the more powerful faction of the corpo-fascist right, and it's been decided that another term of "forgetting" is needed, perhaps the Washington Psst is using the opportunity (foregone conclusion, Romney out) to gain back a little "liberal" cache, by beating up on teenage Romney.
