Paul Begala on Romney: Once a Bully, Always a Bully
The following article with the above profound headline has been cranked out by the Obama campaign crowd. These Marxists have spread a smear story from the Washington Post to muscle up the gay vote for Obama in November with an attack on Romney when he was 18 years old. The story has been described as false by the family involved.
Lefty Begala writes the fokllowing in the Daily Beast:
It is a good general principle that we ought not hold teenage wrongdoing against middle-aged people. Mitt Romney has run a business, run the Olympics, run a state, run for the Senate, and run for president. Surely we can and should judge him on his performance of those public duties.
But what if childhood conduct helps shed a light on adult behavior? Romney’s teenage bullying hurts him because it is consonant with his adult record. Voters may well conclude: once a bully, always a bully; once a privileged abuser of power, always a privileged abuser of power.
If the Washington Post reports of his teenage behavior are true—and even Romney does not dispute them, except to disingenuously say he doesn’t remember—what adult traits do those actions presage?
First, abuse of power. Romney was tall, handsome, and rich. But he was not athletic, at a time and a place when athleticism among young men was the coin of the realm. So he became a cheerleader. Like fellow cheerleaders George W. Bush and Rick Perry, he adopted a macho swagger, perhaps overcompensating for his lack of ability on the field. Maybe that’s why he didn’t confront his nonconformist classmate alone but rather took the coward’s path: assembling a posse in an episode one classmate described as like “Lord of the Flies.”
A less-commented upon part of the Post‘s story on Romney’s teenage years is nearly as cruel as the bullying of his classmate. Cranbrook, Romney’s elite private academy, had a teacher who was so visually impaired the kids called him “The Bat.” Romney and a pal walked The Bat up to a door. Romney beckoned The Bat to walk through first, making a sweeping motion toward the door as if it were open, but it wasn’t. The Bat walked into the closed door as Mitt collapsed in fits of sadistic laughter.
One can draw a straight line from the young man who pinned down a terrified teenager and walked a blind man into a closed door, to the adult who put the family dog in a kennel and strapped it to the roof of the car, to the businessman who laid off hundreds of people, cancelled their health benefits, and paid himself millions while their company went bankrupt. And the line continues: the governor who slashed education and raised fees on the middle class, and the possible president who would use his power to cut taxes on his fellow millionaires while pushing for the gradual demise of traditional Medicare.
Then there is the aura of someone who acts as if the rules don’t apply to him. The Post reported that the abused boy was ultimately expelled from Cranbrook—for smoking a cigarette. Really. The victim got expelled for smoking a cigarette, but Mitt faced no sanctions for maliciously victimizing a vulnerable student and a teacher. It’s good to be a prince. Maybe that’s why Romney felt entitled to take a $10 million bailout for Bain, but opposed President Obama’s bailout of the auto industry. He thinks there’s one set of rules for the privileged, and another for the rest of us.
This is why Romney’s ancient misconduct at Cranbrook haunts him today: it helps illuminate the man who seeks to become the most powerful person in the world.”
Comment: There is far more evidence that America has a damned racist in the White House. We have Obamatones written by Obamahand when he was searching for his father’s authority for evidence….a father who was himself a racist, by the way…..a Muslim one.
No one but a couple Obama Democrats claims Mitt Romney administered the bulliness, this 40 years ago. Mitt says he doesn’t remember the incident, which may be true. He said he wasn’t privy to the haircutting, but had done something untoward teasing regarding an affeminate boy of the day.
I have often repeated that the most difficult burden a young human male can endure in life is being gay. A cancer doesn’t even compete with its weight.
But I do not remember much teasing during my high school years 1948-1952. The public was far more Christian then. To tease to humiliate would have been totally outside the “Christian” thing to do. That word referred to so much decency in those days. It was an understood code which demanded observance lest one be considered unworthy of human intercourse.
I never heard a swear word escape from silence in public school I attended as a child, except for one which slipped from my lips in Miss Marie Hart’s 9th grade General Science class.
Miss Hart made no secret that she was Roman Catholic.
I never swore. I never knew how to use ‘them words’ in syntax. I couldn’t even list five or so I had ever heard in an essay or on a list. No one swore in my public during the Home Front of and after World War II.
Neither of my parents or anyone in both of their extended families ever swore in my or any cousin’s experience.
However, my Mother who never swoer, as I menationed, did have a habit of an “Oh, my Lord” outburst from time to time as a phrase of significant surprise or disbelief. I believe although I cannot be sure, that she expressed herself in this manner during my first week of life with my bottom burried in diapers……she used it so frequently.
“OH, MY LORD, DID SHE?”….my Mother would respond to such news as I have described.
Miss Hart, a teacher in her 50s whom I dearly respected and loved, must have had a different view of that capitalized word in my expression……well, really my Mother’s….for Miss Hart would ahve none of Mother’s expression.
“Mr. Ray…..WHAT DID I HEAR YOU SAY?
By her very tone I knew I dare not repeat it….after all it was only three words. I became speechless.
(Miss Marie Hart was also my homeroom teacher…in room 310 at Central High School in St. Paul, Minnesota.)
Immediately I was instructed to appear at 3:05 in her homeroom, every afternoon for a week.
I said nothing…what was there to say?….after all I had said, “Oh, my Lord”, hadn’t I?
And then, she did say, “Don’t you ever use the Lord’s name in vain, again!” in case I had any doubt what I had done.
Central High School was a little more than five miles from where I lived. Three ‘pieces of public transportation had to be ridden twice every school day for me to go and return from learnings. The same for many 14 year old girls.
It seems we lived on an entirely different planet than this one mouthed by Barack Hussein.
Filed under: American Culture, Barack Obama, Economics and Finance, Education, Marxism, Mitt Romney, National Politics
