Romney’s Too-Cute Apology - PostPartisan
Critics of The Washington Post’s story detailing Mitt Romney’s bullying of a classmate nearly 50 years ago may be right: It has little bearing on the man he is today or the president he might become. The incident hardly matters. His handling of it is a different story. It matters.
Romney says he does not remember forcibly cutting the hair of what was purportedly a gay classmate — a bullying so revolting that some of his former classmates not only remember it years later but can’t get it out of their minds. “To this day it troubles me,” said Thomas Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who had joined Romney in the bullying of their classmate, John Lauber. “What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.” For Romney, this is not a failure of memory. It is a failure of candor.
Or . . . and this is in some degree even worse, the incident meant so little to Romney that I can only conclude that he lacks empathy. He could bully a classmate at the Cranbrook School - cut off his flop of bleached blond hair - and not give it a moment’s thought. This falls into a different category — the-I-love-to- fire-people category, or the down-with-Planned-Parenthood oath he took during the primary fight. He cannot distinguish between losers and victims. They both leave him cold.