Mitt Romney’s campaign calls gay teen bullying report ‘exaggerated’

[Ridgerunner]

“All” accounts? Really? It seems that Mr. White’s account was fabricated.

But certainly by a primary source, President Obama bullied, assaulted, and humiliated “Coretta”. Why did he get away with it? “What mitigating details are we waiting for?”

Well, we’re never going to get an explanation of the “Coretta” incident any more than we’re going to get an explanation of how Obama sat in Rev Wright’s church for 20 years and never heard him utter anything racist or anti-Semitic. Nor is the media interested in any of that because they’re on Obama’s team.

Nor is the media going to investigate Obama’s appointing a member of the Muslim Brotherhood to the Homeland Security Advisory Board. Nor is it going to investigate the removal of security documents by that person from a Homeland security office.

Nor is the media going to investigate Obama’s almost exclusively Marxist upbringing.

Never is the media going to investigate anything negative about Obama.

 

[SamH]

Never is the media going to investigate anything negative about Obama.

The problem is just reporting the unemployment numbers and people driving by gas stations with the price posted is all the negativity most citizens will need to not vote for him.

 

[_Abyssinia]

What does Romney’s relationship with Lauber have to do with it? We already have the basic facts. By all accounts the kid was bullied, assaulted and humiliated by Romney and his gang, left crying and screaming for help. Romney got away with it. What mitigating details are we waiting for?

Where are the school reports? Why wasn’t this incident reported if it was serious? Why didn’t teachers notice John Lauber’s hair having been cut and punish Mitt Romney and any others hat were involved?

 

[ellipsis2]

Serious campaign issues like bladder control are not to be so cavalierly discarded.

Depends.

 

[gilliam]

Depends.

Pun intended?

 

[_Abyssinia]

I take it that your are referring to an incident that Obama related in one of his books:

thetalkofthetimes.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/screen-shot-2012-05-10-at-11-55-46-am.png

There is no evidence that Obama bullied anyone, ever.

Obama shoved a girl. I am making a point. If people are going to hold Mitt Romney accountable for a speculative incident with no proof of it happening (Mitt said he can not remember it and there are no school reports), then Barack Obama should be held accountable too for something which he actually wrote about in his book ‘Dream of My father.’

 

[gilliam]

There is no evidence that Obama bullied anyone, ever.

No, he just tells the Catholic Church that they either pay for contraceptives or else. And he is doing that this year, not when he was an adolescent 50 years ago.

 

[mary_bobo]

Pun intended?

Good one, Gilliam.

 

[_Abyssinia]

In case people were wondering if this is the DNC’s talking point of the day… why, yes, it is. (probably to counter any blow back Obama may get from his announcement yesterday.)

Democrats pounce on story of ‘vicious’ young Romney bullying student

The DNC quickly blasted out an email with the Washington Post article under the subject line “It was vicious” and, in case anyone missed the point, a one sentence introduction: " Key Point: “It was vicious.” …

DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse kept up the onslaught on Twitter, saying “The nominee of @GOP for president led a ‘posse’ in a ‘vicious’ assault on a kid for the way he looked. @MittRomney was an 18yr old adult.”

Deputy Obama campaign manager Stephanie Cutter replied to Woodhouse on Twitter: “. @woodhouseb @gop @mittromney Just the qualities you want in someone who wants to be the leader of the free world.”

abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/democrats-pounce-story-vicious-young-romney-bullying-student/story?id=16320525

Well played DNC… now can we get back to 2012?

I have a suspicion this was planned. First Joe Biden’s comments, then the Education secretary’s, then Barack Obama’s comments about gay ‘marriage’ and now portraying Mitt Romney as a bully and anti-gay. Disgusting.

 

[SamH]

Obama shoved a girl. I am making a point. If people are going to hold Mitt Romney accountable for a speculative incident with no proof of it happening (Mitt said he can not remember it and there are no school reports), then Barack Obama should be held accountable too for something which he actually wrote about in his book ‘Dream of My father.’

Maybe Obama made that part up too - like when he claimed to have a girlfriend.

 

[Jerry_Miah]

All accounts, eh? Stu White has already come forward and said that the Post fabricated his statement about being there and regretting the incident. So that right there raises a huge cloud over the journalistic legitimacy of this piece.

Further, none of the actual description of the incident is attributed to any particular source. Rather, we get the reporter’s version, and a statement that “the incident was recalled similarly by five students”. If it were as awful and harrowing as that, why not describe it in an eyewitnesses own words?

Sounds like RNC damage control; it’s completely counter-factual, as you would expect from the Daily Caller (or whatever your source is, since you don’t name it). Stu White is not even a quoted as witness to the incident, if you would read the WaPo story. He is quoted as saying Romney played lots of pranks, and that’s it. So whether White was there or not when Romney assaulted and humiliated the gay teen is moot.

Stu White says that the Romney campaign is just trying to get him to help them now:

Romney Friend Stu White Says Campaign Wants Him to Counter Prank Accusations

One of Mitt Romney’s closest friends and a high school classmate has been asked by the Romney campaign to come out and offer “supporting remarks” in defense of the candidate following a Washington Post article that described pranks at the Cranbrook School in the 1960s that focused on a student who was “presumed” to be gay. Romney has denied that the pranks were targeted.

Romney’s older brother Scott called White, asking him to act as a surrogate for Romney on their high school years.

White, in an interview with ABC News, said that he is “still debating” whether he will help the campaign, remarking, “It’s been a long time since we’ve been pals.”

abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/05/romney-friend-stu-white-says-campaign-wants-him-to-counter-prank-accusations/

 

[_Abyssinia]

Tell Romney that it didn’t happen, he’s already apologizing:

reuters.com/article/2012/05/10/us-usa-campaign-romney-idUSBRE8491B220120510

“I participated in a lot of hijinks and pranks during high school and some may have gone too far. And for that I apologize,” Romney told Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade during a hastily arranged radio interview. Romney said he didn’t remember the Lauber incident from long ago, but didn’t dispute that it happened. He stressed that he didn’t know either student was gay.

google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h5hZOGaXunUrQtq0FY00bktlQzHA?docId=1476bb1a74254c5280a4fb9ad2c35ab8

 

[Ridgerunner]

There is no evidence that Obama bullied anyone, ever.

Wonder how Coretta saw it at the time.

I don’t know how you see such things, but where I grew up, shoving a girl was about the most dishonorable thing a young fellow could do. Why did he do it? There was no physical threat to him presented by Coretta. It wasn’t even a prank. It was sheer malice, motivated by his pride and his sense of superiority. (See how disparagingly he describes her) She made him an object of the mildest kind of ridicule without intending it. His overweening pride was wounded by the suggestion that he would want this unattractive girl…to the point that he attacked her physically, assaulted her. Did he go after her to apologize, to heal the wound he inflicted on her by treating her like dirt? No he didn’t. Maybe Barack Obama needs to be carefully scrutinized psychologically to see if he is a woman-hater or if he has propensities to abuse women when his pride is wounded. (Wasn’t that, after all, what the O.J. murders were all about?)

And, using the left wing yardstick for such things, it’s well known that rapists attacks do not have sexual motivations; the motivation is a propensity to do violence to females…some deep-seated resentment. And let’s see, didn’t his mother wish him off on various males more than once in his life, including sending him to a foreign country where he was obliged to eat dog?

So, where is the “analysis” of the dangers of electing a potential rapist? If he were a Republican, you would already have that worked out, I’m sure, and posting incessantly about it.

 

[_Abyssinia]

Sounds like RNC damage control; it’s completely counter-factual, as you would expect from the Daily Caller (or whatever your source is, since you don’t name it). Stu White is not even a quoted as witness to the incident, if you would read the WaPo story. He is quoted as saying Romney played lots of pranks, and that’s it. So whether White was there or not when Romney assaulted and humiliated the gay teen is moot.

Stu White says that the Romney campaign is just trying to get him to help them now:

abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/05/romney-friend-stu-white-says-campaign-wants-him-to-counter-prank-accusations/

The Washington Post said:

“I always enjoyed his pranks,” said Stu White, a popular friend of Romney’s who went on to a career as a public school teacher and has long been bothered by the Lauber incident.

washingtonpost.com/politics/mitt-romneys-prep-school-classmates-recall-pranks-but-also-troubling-incidents/2012/05/10/gIQA3WOKFU_print.html

But in an interview with ABC Stu White contracts what the Washington Post says:

While the Post reports White as having “long been bothered” by the haircutting incident,” he told ABC News he was not present for the prank, in which Romney is said to have forcefully cut a student’s long hair and was not aware of it until this year when he was contacted by the Washington Post.

abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/05/romney-friend-stu-white-says-campaign-wants-him-to-counter-prank-accusations

If Stu White did not hear of the prank until the Washington Post told him about it then how could be have ‘long been bothered by the Lauber incident’ which the Washington Post claimed. They either fabricated that or sloppily reported. The Washington Post needs to correct that article.

 

[ellipsis2]

Pun intended?

Good catch!

 

[Havard]

Stu White is not even a quoted as witness to the incident, if you would read the WaPo story.

They originally implied he was a witness. What the Post article said at the time of print:

“I always enjoyed his pranks,” said Stu White, a popular friend of Romney’s who went on to a career as a public school teacher and has long been bothered by the Lauber incident.

What the article NOW says:

“I always enjoyed his pranks,” said Stu White, a popular friend of Romney’s who went on to a career as a public school teacher and said he has been “disturbed” by the Lauber incident since hearing about it several weeks ago, before being contacted by The Washington Post. “But I was not the brunt of any of his pranks.”

Pretty shady stuff!

 

[_Abyssinia]

Was Romney Enforcing Cranbrook’s Dress Code?

Mitt Romney’s so-called “gay-bashing” incident at high school may have been no more than an officially-sanctioned attempt to enforce the school’s dress code, and not any kind of bullying, according to a former Cranbrook student who spoke exclusively to Breitbart News.

Mitt Romney was something of a failed high school athlete, but he had plenty of school spirit and led his prep school in cheers and worked the sideline at football games. It is that school spirit that probably led him to cut the hair of a fellow student in a prank gone wrong – a prank the Washington Post

speculatively suggested was homosexual-bashing.

Cranbrook had a strict code of conduct, including a dress code. Boys at Cranbrook until the 1980s were required to wear a coat and tie. “School spirit meant supreme teamwork,” writes Kathryn Bishop Eckert in Cranbrook. “In observation of the dress code and the code of conduct students dressed and behaved as young gentlemen.” Even today, Cranbrook Kingswood Upper School maintains a strict dress code relative to other prep schools: jeans are forbidden. On Mondays (so-called Formal Dress Day) boys still wear a dress shirt with a tie and girls have to wear dresses or dressy tops with skirts. This is not uncommon. Many prep schools across the country ban dyed hair, even today.

Clay Matthews, today Cranbrook’s director of public relations and communications, noted that it was likely that dyed hair was prohibited from Cranbrook in 1965 under the school’s code of contact.

Romney clearly conformed to the dress code, and to the code of conduct. Lauber clearly did not. Unlike Romney, Lauber was known as a nonconformist who walked around campus with bleached-blond hair in what Romney probably correctly saw as a violation of the school’s dress code. That Romney did it within the sight of Matthew Friedemann, the school’s prefect to whom he complained about Lauber, indicates that Romney thought of himself as merely enforcing the rules (at prep schools in those days, prefects maintained order and discipline, often in exchange for discounted room and board).

The fact that Romney was not disciplined by the administration in the aftermath of the incident is further evidence that Romney was enforcing the dress code overzealously, rather than targeting Lauber for any perceived homosexuality.

“Boys will be boys,” the saying used to be. That is, unless they decide to run for President as a Republican. Then it is fair game, and the gloves are off for the media hack job.

breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/05/10/Was-Romney-Enforcing-Dress-Code

 

[Jeffrey]

That depends on the crime that was committed. Some felons after they are off parole… can vote.

That is a very fair assessment. I agree that *some *people grow out of being bullies/idiots. However, not all people grow out of it. Society has always judged a person based on their past. For instance, felons can’t vote.

For example, knowing that a person tortured animals as a child would make you think twice about hiring him to watch your kids.

 

[Jerry_Miah]

FALSE!!!

What the Post article said at the time of print:

What the article NOW says:

“long been bothered by” does not necessarily mean “witnessed”

But, sure, maybe there was a mistake. And we know what is happening, right? The RNC will find some minor mistake (someone’s age, a date slightly off) and try to say that means the whole thing didn’t happen. I am well aware of this kind of thing from Deniers of all kinds. But sorry, not this time. Romney has already admitted participating and has apologized for it.

This RNC method is a very deceptive and dishonest tactic, that should not be condoned by a Christian forum.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I have a suspicion this was planned. First Joe Biden’s comments, then the Education secretary’s, then Barack Obama’s comments about gay ‘marriage’ and now portraying Mitt Romney as a bully and anti-gay. Disgusting.

Sure. Obama is looking at the polls, as he does in all things, and believes the majority in this country support homosexual “marriage”. Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t, but there are polls, most notably the PEW poll that says it’s so.

So, despite his 2008 denials, Obama now feels like he can openly support gay marriage, which he did secretly all along. He now (astonishingly and totally unbelievably) claims his 10 and 13 year old daughters had a big hand in persuading him. And one has to wonder about those dinner table conversations…discussing homosexuality with a ten year old??? Does he really do that? But then, he announced his support for abortion in their presence when they were even younger, so he might have no particular concern about the corruption of the young.

Possibly, Obama made a mistake with this, since the polls also show support for homosexual “marriage” decreasing over the last few years. But he probably has his own polls; lots of them, and perhaps they tell him something different.

And, having thought this out for a long time, and having concluded that the voting public is likely to be intolerant of anything that can be represented (even falsely, as in this instance) as “homophobic”, and since Axelrod’s private investigative hordes have probably sifted every moment of Romney’s life, the “team” decided this was the time to play the “homophobic bully” card via the captive media on a public they hope is sufficiently gullible to swallow the whole thing. But they didn’t think this up yesterday.

And hasn’t there been quite a bit of money spent in the media and in the educational system on “bullying”, especially bullying of homosexuals?

The Party of Death has been working on this thing for quite awhile. And it isn’t going to end with smearing Romney. In his second term, Obama is going to push homosexuality full bore, and in many ways, and everybody who might oppose his program is being given an object lesson now on the consequences of doing so.

And poor Cardinal Dolan thinks the ONLY reason he might end up in jail in Obama’s second term is for refusing to accede to Obama’s dictat that the Church support contraception and abortion?

How did Cardinal George put it?

“I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.”