There’s a kind of funny piece on the front page of the NYT this a.m. about Mitten’s Stanford days during the 1960’s.

Mr. Romney was on the AxeComm, a school spirit committee. His charge was to keep students at the University of California, Berkeley, from stealing the Stanford Axe, an old lumberjack’s ax awarded to the winner of the universities’ annual football game. He succeeded, infiltrating a cabal of Berkeley students under the pseudonym Tim Yenmor (his name spelled backward), learning their plans and planting disinformation about the ax’s location.

‘We were more concerned about protecting the ax from Berkeley students than about the war in Southeast Asia,’ said Michael Roake, another freshman who joined Mr. Romney on the mission. ‘It sounds silly and trivial now. But at the time, we were very earnest.’

snip

Mr. Romney, though, stayed true to his chinos and the Vietnam War, even joining a counterprotest against the occupation of the office of the university president, Wallace Sterling. Forty-six years later, some classmates remember his pro-war stand as principled and heartfelt; others say he merely championed the worldview of his father, George Romney, then Michigan’s governor, a war supporter and a future contender for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination. Still others say he sailed through the most schismatic moral and political issue of that time — and perhaps of any period since in the United States — with neither much angst nor introspection.

What a doofus. Dovetails perfectly with his politically tone-deaf remarks about the president and the killing of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya.

nytimes.com