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Praetorian WaPo: Romney not better than Jesus [Darleen Click]

… pulls troubling stunt as teen in 1965 …

Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. 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.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

… OOooooOOOoooo! Troubling! Not just any long-haired non-conformist, but a presumed gay kid! In 1965!!

At least when Jesus tossed the money changers out of the temple, they weren’t presumed homosexuals.

Funny how this appears one day after Obama’s forced-by-my-daughters’-emotions evolutionary announcement of support for same-sex “marriage”.

No, no coordination here. None at all. Nothing to see.

h/t William Jacobson who adds:

I once participated in a group which gave someone a wedgie when I was at summer camp in the 1960s. That’s why I’ll never run for President, my record is stained.

Now about that Obama trip to Pakistan and his 20 years in Jeremiah Wright’s church … bigot, racist, Islamophobe, wingnut.

77 Replies to “Praetorian WaPo: Romney not better than Jesus [Darleen Click]”

  1. Car in says:

    Funny how they couldn’t find a single story to report about Obama growing up. No friends. No nothing. Obama was allowed to write his own history.

  2. Alec Leamas says:

    I wonder if this has anything to do with yesterday’s announcement by the President.

    The Washington Post is an august and trusted institution, so this is probably just a coincidence.

  3. Squid says:

    It breaks my heart that such a stalwart defender of TRVTH sees its circulation and revenues continue to plummet.

  4. B Moe says:

    I think Obama was marching in Selma in 1965.

  5. happyfeet says:

    that was a very accurate presumption to make

    He came out as gay to his family and close friends and led a vagabond life, taking dressage lessons in England and touring with the Royal Lipizzaner Stallion riders. After an extreme fit of temper in front of his mother and sister at home in South Bend, he checked into the Menninger Clinic psychiatric hospital in Topeka, Kan. Later he received his embalmer’s license, worked as a chef aboard big freighters and fishing trawlers, and cooked for civilian contractors during the war in Bosnia and then, a decade later, in Iraq. His hair thinned as he aged, and in the winter of 2004 he returned to Seattle, the closest thing he had to a base. He died there of liver cancer that December.

    He kept his hair blond until he died, said his sister Chris. “He never stopped bleaching it.”

  6. Ernst Schreiber says:

    A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

    Isn’t that an example of community organizing in action?

  7. B Moe says:

    The whole episode sounds pretty fucking gay to me.

    Are we sure about Romney?

  8. JHoward says:

    A nasty thing to do. Romney can get stuffed, although not entirely for being a dick.

  9. Squid says:

    Isn’t that an example of community organizing in action?

    Why should this kid have longer hair than all the other boys? They had to cut his hair off, FOR THE FAIRNESS!

  10. JHoward says:

    Obama was allowed to write his own history.

    Indeedy. I say Obama doesn’t exist. He’s a manufactured hologram projected into existence by a pair of teleprompters*. Would explain a lot.

    *Or by one Geo. Soros.

  11. EBL says:

    You never know. It might have been just to mark the passing of Vidal Sassoon.

  12. EBL says:

    The story coming out when it did that is.

    Obviously there is coordination.

    I am not sure this is even true. It does sound sort of gay and douchey to do something like that. But it might be completely fabricated and I am surprised this has never come up before. If they made such a big deal over the dog on the roof, why was this held back (unless they were saving it for a time like this).

  13. In high school, a bunch of us tackled the biggest, hairiest guy in our class (think Harry and the Hendersons), he was a football player and enormously strong, but easy to take down for some reason. We pants him and duct-taped his asscheeks together. It was hi-larious. You know how monkeys have that big, bald red ass? His was like that when we finished. Before, he was more like the Shaggy DA. Anyway, he had to pull it off, it made his ass sore and we all got in trouble because we just ate Lenny’s rabbit. The we found out he had just been diagnosed with Lyme disease. Which he got from a tick, or a flea, or when he got fucked by a moose or something, who the hell knows, he was an animal. Anyway, I feel guilty about this… sometimes. Sometimes I cry when I masturbate to old Six Million Dollar Man episodes too.

  14. Vote for me. Motherfuckers.

  15. EBL says:

    Okay, who is Matthew Friedemann? Who did Matthew vote for in 2008? Why is the story coming out now? Who what where when and especially why?

    I have not heard of such humiliation since this…
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7XJ2-hKy60

  16. motionview says:

    Two good men in a clean fair fight.

  17. motionview says:

    At least one member of the loud and proud crowd (Gawker link) understands that Obama is as always full of shit, and surprise surprise the man who has been lying to the rubes for sixteen years is not done lying. Quelle surprise?!

  18. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Obama’s been giving haircuts like that since he took office.

    Only his are figurative.

  19. Alec Leamas says:

    I spent some time as a teenager at an Irish boarding school for boys.

    I’d have to say that cutting someone’s hair is on the extremely tame side. Let’s just say that I know where William Golding found his inspiration.

  20. Mr. W says:

    Amazing. The Post has more just printed more direct quotes from people who knew Mitt in his youth than they have printed regarding Barack in the three years he’s been in office.

    The Post reporters had better ease up on the Mitt history lesson or the contrast is going to get even more glaring.

  21. No, see, the Washington Post is running this now so next week they can run a front page article congratulating Mitt Romney’s on his growth and evolution as an individual, just like they have for Obama with respect to gay marraige.

  22. StrangernFiction says:

    The Romney campaign could retaliate with this, but that would be downright boorish.

  23. geoffb says:

    Will Romney break the Palin record for number of journalists assigned to digging into a politician’s past?

    Matthew Friedemann should count himself lucky that it is a Republican that he has stories about.

  24. Slartibartfast says:

    Which is more operative, here; that the kid might have been gay, or that the kid had long hair?

    Could be both. Could be that the point was that they were attacking his gayness by cutting his hair, but that would be what’s known in journalist circles as “a stretch”. A big fucking stretch.

  25. leigh says:

    This whole story sounds like bullshit. A kid with long bleached hair at a prep school in 1965? I don’t think so. Prep schools have dress codes, codes of honor and all that.

    Did Jason Blair get a new gig at WaPo?

  26. Ernst Schreiber says:

    How do you apologize to a dead man?

    Idiot.

    (Romney, that is)

  27. Slartibartfast says:

    And if you’re Dave Weigel, “effeminate”=”gay.

    It’s only a matter of time until they bring out Grond to bash Romney’s gates down.

  28. Slartibartfast says:

    Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors

    That happened to me once. Or, really, once every six weeks or so. Takes me positively hours to collect myself afterwards.

  29. Slartibartfast says:

    This is being carried pretty much everywhere. It’s amazing how credulous the media thinks we are.

  30. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Long bangs, leigh

    Or maybe it was the start of the fall semester and he’d spent the summer bumming on the beach.

  31. Pablo says:

    Now this is a stretch!

    /Aussie off

  32. Mr. W says:

    We’re lucky they’re incompetent.

  33. leigh says:

    Well, clutch the pearls. Ernst, quite obviously Romney is a brute! I’ll bet he and his posse passed around contriband like the ladies lingerie section of the Sears catalogue.

  34. Squid says:

    It’s only a matter of time until they bring out Grond to bash Romney’s gates down.

    I remember how that battle ended. I also remember how many good men had to die, and it upsets me a bit to think that Dread Lord Soros is mobilizing his Nazgul and his Orcs once again.

    OCCUPY MINAS TIRITH!

  35. Matt says:

    So Romney is going to lose the bleached blonde vote ?

  36. mc4ever59 says:

    So the pressing topic of the day in the media is a school prank from 1965.
    For which Romney immediately falls all over himself to apologize for.
    Which Captain Ed at Hot Air says was the smart thing to do politically.
    Fuck me to tears.

  37. cranky-d says:

    This is pretty much going as I have foreseen. The media will make relentless attacks on Romney, and he’ll apologize like the pussy he is. He will not drive the agenda, he will capitulate to the agenda set by the left. He could easily turn this around on the media and attack them for ignoring the reality of the economy being destroyed by Obama’s policies, but he won’t, since Obama is a “good man.”

    And he will lose.

  38. happyfeet says:

    Mitt Romney was a notorious high school prankster whose antics may have verged on gay bashing, according to a blockbuster report.*

  39. dicentra says:

    … pulls troubling stunt as teen in 1965 …

    And yet, he’s still not a dog-eating commie.

  40. mc4ever59 says:

    cranky-d at 11:18;
    That’s pretty much it in a nutshell.

  41. palaeomerus says:

    “I remember how that battle ended. I also remember how many good men had to die, and it upsets me a bit to think that Dread Lord Soros is mobilizing his Nazgul and his Orcs once again.”

    Does that make the conservative tea party types the dishonored dead of Dunharrow? Is this website the paths of the dead in the shadow of Dwimorberg? Are we supposed to be helping the true king seize some black sailed Umbarian pirate ships or something?

  42. leigh says:

    What? No gazing back through the gauzy lens of the past to the way things were forty-seven years ago?

    There’s no jounalistic integrity anymore.

  43. Alec Leamas says:

    If he promises not to cut the hair of any effeminate, possibly gay teens from here on out, can we focus on the economy.

  44. leigh says:

    If Romney dipped your pig-tails in the inkwell in grade school…

  45. Ryan C. says:

    I guess they’re going for the hard-of-thinking voters with that story (business as usual), because most people really don’t care if a middle-aged adult did something juvenile and mean back when s/he was a teenager. Even if turns out to be mostly true, that was 47 years ago, and show me someone who never did anything cruel as a child or teen and I’ll show you a liar. Mitt being a meanie once when he was 17-18 is a non-story. Especially since there are grandmas and grandpas out there today who weren’t even born yet when it allegedly happened.

    It would be interesting to dig up the voting records of some of the older career Democrats and see what they were voting for and doing in 1965.

  46. LBascom says:

    I remember in the 60’s, my dad making(physically) my 16 y.o. brother get a haircut. No damn hippy looking kids were going to live in his house.

    His hair was about as long as Paul McCartney’s in the Beatles first Ed Sullivan appearance, which was brought up during the altercation.

    It was a scene man…

  47. leigh says:

    I remember Hair Wars well. My teen cousins were forcefully buzz-cut by my uncles for “lookin’ like a damned girl.” My cousin Randy really pushed it with the Beatle haircut and the Beatle boots.

  48. Alec Leamas says:

    I’ve had my hair forcibly cut.

    By nuns.

  49. LBascom says:

    Ha! Well played Alec!

  50. Jeff G. says:

    Here’s the difference, Pablo: Obama wont apologize or otherwise dignify the story, nor will anyone on the right with any clout make him.

    The left owns us. We’re their puppets.

  51. DarthLevin says:

    Nuns are well-knows as hohophobes, Alec.

  52. Roddy Boyd says:

    I spent a night in a hospital after my first boarding school hazing.

    Pretty weak tea.

  53. SteveG says:

    So did Jacobsen really use “wedgie” and “stained” together? Someone needs to install a bidet. not just for cleanliness, but then you can hold the kid down and push the little pedal and make him drink from the fountain.

    Anyway, what a dumb story to make a big deal of.
    Romney appears to have grown up into a guy who would never do such a thing himself, and further, into a guy who would step in and stop it.
    Obama?
    Nah
    Still a punk.
    I’ll bet if I played basketball against Obama and D him tough he’d get all angry and haughty.. and I bet he’d flip a tantrum if I then lit him up on O. I’d be lost in a swarm of the last five secret service agents who haven’t scored a hooker when Obama is out on tour

  54. BT says:

    Romney appears to have grown up into a guy who would never do such a thing himself, and further, into a guy who would step in and stop it.

    I am sure that after long reflection upon his behavior in his teen years, his thinking has evolved.

  55. EBL says:

    Since Mitt Romney’s high school history seems so relevant to this election, I am assuming the same holds true for Obama’s high school years? Who set up Barack Obama’s Big Comrades program with Frank Marshall Davis and more importantly, why did they set it up?

  56. newrouter says:

    According to the Washington Post, one witness who says he does remember it is Stu White. But notice a detail in the Post story.

    “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.

    The Post story does not say that White says he has long been bothered by the incident. It gets into White’s head and makes the claim for him.

    That’s an important distinction. ABC News followed up Mr. White, and found this:

    “White 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.”

    How could White have “long been bothered” by a prank for which he was not present, and of which he was not even aware until the Post told him about it? Is this sloppy writing, or fabrication?

    link

  57. […] journalism on Mitt Romney’s high-school days.This is probably just a coincidence.UPDATE: Question the timing, you say?Funny how this appears one day after Obama’s forced-by-my-daughters’-emotions […]

  58. geoffb says:

    This gives Obama and Romney something in common. They both went to the most exclusive prep schools in their respective States. Romney’s father was the Governor so that is no surprise. Will there be pieces on the exclusive prep school Obama went to and will we see 5000 word pieces about his actions as a teen?

    Wouldn’t it be more fun as a journalist to hang out in Hawaii than East Tawas or even Harbor Springs, Michigan though all of these must beat out Wasilla AK.

  59. cranky-d says:

    Wasilla is quite pretty in the summer.

  60. leigh says:

    Will there be pieces on the exclusive prep school Obama went to and will we see 5000 word pieces about his
    actions as a teen?

    In the interest of journalistic integrity, I would say “certainly.” We could find out what kind of a team player he was from his high school basketball coach. Whether or not he was good at math or wrote a decent essay. Was he on the Debate Team? Voted most (fill in the blank)? Old girlfriends? Was he popular or a nebbish? A jock or stuffed in a locker a lot?

    The American people need to know.

  61. RI Red says:

    We still don’t know shit about Obama except that he sucks at being president.

  62. palaeomerus says:

    I hear that Romney just kidnapped a gay kid from a private school and drove him around in a dog carrier on top of his car. Fuckin’ crazy ass mormons! Oughta’ be a law! Poor gay kid was so terrified that Romney had to shave his head! And then Obama tried to eat him!

    Yeah, I’m the new Bill Mahr.

  63. McGehee says:

    Funny how they couldn’t find a single story to report about Obama growing up.

    That’s ’cause of he didn’t.

  64. newrouter says:

    well baracky’s book is finally being read

  65. […] stinks here, and Stacy McCain, who knows the newspaper business sheds some light on this. UPDATE: Question the timing, you […]

  66. bh says:

    What bias?

  67. jdw says:

    Fifteen-year-old kids don’t always do the brightest things. The human brain, like fine wine, must age before it’s chilled.

  68. Pablo says:

    When you write something wrong accidentally, it’s a typo. When you do it on purpose, it’s a WaPo.

  69. newrouter says:

    In his 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent, Ayers tells of a useful reading assignment from the 1992 book, The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas, by black author Reginald McKnight. The passage in question deals with the travails of Clint, the first black student in a newly integrated school, who tries to distance himself from Marvin, the only other black boy in the school.

    “Can you believe that guy?” Clint tells a white student. “He’s like a pig or something. Makes me sick.” Upon reflection, Clint thinks, “I was ashamed. Ashamed for not defending Marvin and ashamed that Marvin even existed.” Sound familiar?

    These obvious parallels might have seemed mere coincidence had not friendly Obama biographer David Remnick found the little black girl at Punahou — a real girl, not a composite — whom he identifies as “Joella Edwards.” The difference, Remnick admits without understanding its consequences, is that “Barry never rejected Joella.” Au contraire, as Joella gushes, “He was my knight in shining armor.”

    Say what you will about prankster Mitt Romney, but he never contracted with a terrorist to make up stuff about him. He never had to. The Washington Post was all too willing to do the job.

    link

  70. McGehee says:

    When you write something wrong accidentally, it’s a typo. When you do it on purpose, it’s a WaPo.

    In honor of this, I hereby declare the true and correct nickname for the Washington Post henceforward shall be: WhopPo.

    …as in “whopper” — the derisive nickname for an Italian has no H. Get your mind out of the gutter.

  71. I once paid a long-haired (what I presume was a) man to shave my taint and wax my nipples. Good money too.

  72. geoffb says:

    How to really do the bully gig.

    Here’s what happens when the president of the United States publicly targets a private citizen for the crime of supporting his opponent.

    Frank VanderSloot is the CEO of Melaleuca Inc. The 63-year-old has run that wellness-products company for 26 years out of tiny Idaho Falls, Idaho. Last August, Mr. VanderSloot gave $1 million to Restore Our Future, the Super PAC that supports Mitt Romney.

    Three weeks ago, an Obama campaign website, “Keeping GOP Honest,” took the extraordinary step of publicly naming and assailing eight private citizens backing Mr. Romney. Titled “Behind the curtain: a brief history of Romney’s donors,” the post accused the eight of being “wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records.” Mr. VanderSloot was one of the eight, smeared particularly as being “litigious, combative and a bitter foe of the gay rights movement.”

    What does this tell us? It tells us that the Obama campaign wants to go after donors that support Mitt Romney in a very personal way. In the words of now-former EPA administrator Al Armendariz, their general philosophy is to find a few offenders and crucify them as an example to the rest.

    Not Chicago Rules, Mob Rules.

  73. geoffb says:

    Once you make some examples and show that you will, have the will to do so then your enemies often end up like this Stockholm Syndrome sufferer and praised for it too which is the small carrot to go with the vicious stick.

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