Beast of Cranbrook

Forty years on, when afar and asunderParted are those who are singing today,When you look back, and forgetfully wonderWhat you were like in your work and your play,Then, it may be, there will often come o’er you,Glimpses of notes like the catch of a song –Visions of boyhood shall float them before you,Echoes of dreamland shall bear them along

 -- Cranbrook school song

In my last post I talked about Mitt Romney's lack of character-- of backbone, if you will.

Now we know he's a bully of the worst sort-- and showing his usual lack of character by calling the horrible things he did "pranks" and claiming to not remember them.

Today's Washington Post carries an article by Jason Horowitz that visits Romney's days at Michigan's prestigious Cranbook prep school. The picture isn't pretty.

Multiple classmates remember Romney leading a gang of classmates to assault fellow student John Lauber. When they found him, the classmates held Lauber down while Romney cut off his blond hair with a pair of scissors.

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.

In another equally mean incident, Romney deliberately led his blind professor into a glass door.

Pranks? Hardly. Let's call it what it is: brutish.

Romney is denying he knew John Lauber was gay-- which clearly isn't true. 

The idea that this is something that was known by me ... is obviously absurd. I had no idea that this person might have been gay.

Romney claimed he didn't remember the hair-cutting incident and made a half-assed, insincere apology:

I participated in a lot of hijinks and pranks during high school and some might have gone too far and for that, I apologize.

The fact is Romney was a mean little ass in high school. He still is a mean little ass, he's just learned to channel it into doing things like firing people and making up absurd lies about President Obama.

Ask yourself. Did you ever hold someone down and forcibly cut their hair? Did you ever deliberately walk your blind professor into a plate-glass door? Of course you didn't. Romney did. He was a sociopathic fuck when he was at Cranbrook, and he's a sociopathic fuck now.

Sources

Horowitz, Jason. (2012, 10 May). Mitt Romney's prep school classmates recall pranks, but also troubling incidents. Washington Post.

Stein, Sam. (2012, 10 May). Romney apologizes for bulling in prep school, says he didn't know the victim was gay. Huffington Post.

p.s. Love this comment from Yellerkitty on the Washington Post site:

You bet I remember things I did over 60 years ago! I remember swiping two little packages of plastic lacing (pink and blue) from the F.W. Woolworths when I was about 5 years old. People with a conscience DO remember. Only those who are so amoral that they do not view their actions as egregious or those who repeat them so often they begin to blend into each other do not remember. TerpfanMA is right ... that's pretty much the definition of, if not an out-and-out sociopath, then certainly someone with ethics issues.