Another Weasel Apology

rugcat said:

I agree with this.

I personally don't think it was even necessarily primarily a gay bashing kind of thing -- at least not in the sense of hating gays. It was common to mock kids who acted "queer" without any real concept of what that meant -- it was more that they were "weird" and certainly deserved to be ostracized and made fun of.

So it's more, imo. about bullying by the alpha males of the school, the privileged, the "cool kids." And it shows an unpleasant side of Romney's personality, but not much more -- certainly nothing to disqualify him from holding office. Many unpleasant people have made effective leaders.

What most people are jumping on, and rightly, is his attempt to weasel out of it with "Gosh, I just don't remember anything like that." Again, not unusual for a politician, but Romney seems to embrace weaselness as a lifestyle choice. (Unless you believe he was born that way.)

To some extent it seems to be working, however. There are plenty of people who buy his explanation.

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This afternoon, the Melissa Harris-Perry show contrasted Romney's "I don't remember" dodge with George W. Bush's press conference in which he stood up and owned responsibility for his college-years DUI.

Now I don't have a single use for GW Bush, but he did the right thing on that. He stood up and admitted that he did it, it was wrong, he did it because he was young and stupid, and he learned his lesson from it. That was the right thing to do both ethically and politically. It was right ethically because it was honest. It was right politically because we never heard about that incident again, except in occasional jokes.

Now let's compare Romney's "I don't recall" beating a guy down with a gang and going at his hair with scissors to Bill Clinton's "I did not have sex with that woman."

I happen to think Bill Clinton was an excellent president, but he screwed that up so bad that he humiliated the whole country by it and fed the fires of a scandal that I believe would have been nothing but a brief sizzle if he'd just owned the Lewinsky affair the way Bush owned his DUI (which is a ton more serious than naughty-nookie but which did a ton less damage because of how it was handled). And what exactly did Clinton do wrong? He weaseled. He lied. He squirmed. He should have been a mensch and owned his actions, but instead he acted like a little kid trying to avoid getting grounded. It was ridiculous.

And it dogged him for years, and we still hear about it to this day, from time to time.

Romney can weasel, or he can do the thing that is both smart and honest. He's weaseling. I hesitate to say he's choosing to weasel, because for him, I'm not sure it is a choice. I do think he was likely born that way.

The Lewinsky Scandal did prompt the whole series of outing scandals of the late 90s and early 00s, which demonstrated to many people that sexuality had some genetic component as opposed to something that was purely environmental. It had a warped benefit like that.

Bartholomew said:

Males in the US are still forcibly subjected to genital mutilation at birth, a problem that feminists, if actually working for sexual equality, should tackle. Do they?

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What males? What mutilation? Who is using force? This is news to me.

rugcat said:

Again, if a group of teens were out on the town, just "wilding," came across your wife walking home from work, pinned her to the ground and shaved her head, you'd have no problem with the cops shrugging and saying "Hey, just youthful hijinks. No harm no foul."

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Again what? We weren't talking about attacks on women.

muravyets said:

(ETA: Unless the answer to my question was that, indeed, you don't think the Indian War, the Dredd Scott decision, or marital rape were outrageous until recently. If so, then, we should stop talking about, you and I.)

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Your attempt to turn my comment into some kind of (out of context) time unlimited blanket historical claim will be happening without me.

ETA: More on topic, I'm more outraged by this weak attempt to generate outrage at the knowledge that Gov. Romney was a prep school bully -- nearly 50 years after the fact than the fact that he probably was. It is the kind of "Hey look at me, I'm clever." writing that has helped to discredit journalism.

muravyets said:

Now let's compare Romney's "I don't recall" beating a guy down with a gang and going at his hair with scissors to Bill Clinton's "I did not have sex with that woman."

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The story I read didn't say anything about beating a guy down. Merely that he was tackled and held down. To vastly different activities.

Shadow_Ferret said:

What males? What mutilation? Who is using force? This is news to me.

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I'm thinking Bart was referring to circumcision. Bart?

Williebee said:

I'm thinking Bart was referring to circumcision. Bart?

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Oh. Guess I never thought of that as mutilation. Especially not FORCED. Just a surgical procedure many believe is done for sanitary and health reasons.

Shadow_Ferret said:

Again what? We weren't talking about attacks on women.

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Are you saying an attack on a woman would be terrible, but an attack on a perceived gay man is just horseplay? Cause that's what your statement seems to imply.

muravyets said:

This afternoon, the Melissa Harris-Perry show contrasted Romney's "I don't remember" dodge with George W. Bush's press conference in which he stood up and owned responsibility for his college-years DUI.

Now I don't have a single use for GW Bush, but he did the right thing on that. He stood up and admitted that he did it, it was wrong, he did it because he was young and stupid, and he learned his lesson from it. That was the right thing to do both ethically and politically.

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A 100% agreement with this statement. Just needed to be said.

Which represents a clear departure from his later statement, in reference to Iraq, that "There's good and there's evil, and that's it."

It's not a dichotomy. It's a trinity: Good, evil, and stupidity.

caw

Shadow_Ferret said:

The story I read didn't say anything about beating a guy down. Merely that he was tackled and held down. To vastly different activities.

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That sounds like a subjective judgment. You heard the story and decided it was just horseplay and nothing more. I heard the story and decided it was more.

I took the entire account as published at various times. The story as I have heard it so far includes such features as four or five guys maneuvering one guy from an upright position to down on the floor, the one guy appearing and acting extremely upset and fearful, and the four or five guys restraining him on the ground while one of their number (Romney) cut his hair with scissors. On the basis of those alleged facts, I concluded this was an assault committed as an act of violent bullying.

On what did you base your conclusion that it was just a tackle?

I ask because I have to say I'm confused. I don't know how they play football where you're from, but in my neck of the woods holding the guy down and messing with him after his forward motion has been stopped is not a "tackle." It's a penalty because it's against the rules. And off the field, putting a guy on the ground and holding him down while you cut his hair off is not a tackle, either. It's assault.

rugcat said:

Are you saying an attack on a woman would be terrible, but an attack on a perceived gay man is just horseplay? Cause that's what your statement seems to imply.

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Are we talking about the actual incident in question or something else?

Because the story, yeah, just horseplay.

muravyets said:

On what did you base your conclusion that it was just a tackle?

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The use of the word "tackle" in the article in the OP's post.

Shadow_Ferret said:

Are we talking about the actual incident in question or something else?

Because the story, yeah, just horseplay.

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This is pretty amazing to me. Bullying in school has finally come into the national consciousness as a serious problem, both for gay kids, kids perceived as gay, and simply those who don't fit in. A film about that was just made: Bully

Kids who are bullied suffer humiliation and fear that can have lifetime effects. Some of them actually kill themselves.

So here we have a case where high school kids pin down a classmate who they either perceive as gay, or at the very least, different, and forcibly cut his hair. Your response: a shrug. Pretty much the response school administrators have had for years.

I used the example of what if this happened to your wife in an (apparently) vain attempt to personalize it, to make you aware that it's really not just "hijinks," but that it's something that is serious and affects people.

Your response was basically "Huh? I though we were talking about boys?"

WTF?

This is pretty amazing to me. Bullying in school has finally come into the national consciousness as a serious problem, both for gay kids, kids perceived as gay, and simply those who don't fit in. A film about that was just made: Bully

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And wouldn't it have been nice if Gov. Romney had indicated at least some awareness of this?

I guess I'm looking at it as something that happened 40+ years ago, not now, not with our current view of these things. There was no film called "Bully" then. Bullying happened. You lived with it and moved on.

Unless you believe Romney just did this last week.

Shadow_Ferret said:

Are we talking about the actual incident in question or something else?

Because the story, yeah, just horseplay.

The use of the word "tackle" in the article in the OP's post.

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Is that all? Because that paragraph in the article also contained other words such as:

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.

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Later paragraphs contained additional information, such as, for example (from eyewitness reports):

...Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was “terrified,” he said.


...


“It was a hack job,” recalled Maxwell, a childhood friend of Romney who was in the dorm room when the incident occurred. “It was vicious.”


“He was just easy pickin’s,” said Friedemann, then the student prefect, or student authority leader of Stevens Hall, expressing remorse about his failure to stop it.

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(all bolding added by me)

Like I said, that doesn't sound like just a tackle to me. Sounds like the planned action of a bully.

Shadow_Ferret said:

I guess I'm looking at it as something that happened 40+ years ago, not now, not with our current view of these things. There was no film called "Bully" then. Bullying happened. You lived with it and moved on.

Unless you believe Romney just did this last week.

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What I believe Romney did this week is dodge responsibility for his own actions and refuse to account for it to the public whose support he seeks. I refer you back to my comparison of Romney's response to this and GW Bush's response to the revelation of his college DUI for why Romney's response is a bad one.

muravyets said:

where they came upon Lauber, tackled him

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You even highlighted it yourself.

muravyets said:

What I believe Romney did this week is dodge responsibility for his own actions and refuse to account for it to the public whose support he seeks. I refer you back to my comparison of Romney's response to this and GW Bush's response to the revelation of his college DUI for why Romney's response is a bad one.

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I do agree with this. And being confronted with his past actions and laughing about it, or making a joke about it, or whatever he did (I haven't seen any footage) just shows that he maybe, unlike most of us, hasn't matured any since high school.

Shadow_Ferret said:

Bullying happened. You lived with it and moved on.

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Except for those who committed suicide, of course.

I applaud your empathy, though.

Shadow_Ferret said:

I guess I'm looking at it as something that happened 40+ years ago, not now, not with our current view of these things. There was no film called "Bully" then. Bullying happened. You lived with it and moved on.

Unless you believe Romney just did this last week.

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A number of us have explicitly stated that we're much more critical of Romney's present-day response to the incident than we are of the incident itself. Specifically, that he's being evasive and dishonest about it, and that he shown no sign of remorse or contrition about it.

rugcat said:

Except for those who committed suicide, of course.

I applaud your empathy, though.

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I don't need empathy. I was one of those "different" kids who was bullied by the jocks or the special people.

As I said, those things happened back then.

Shadow_Ferret said:

You even highlighted it yourself.

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Are you skipping over the rest of the article's content for some reason?

I do agree with this. And being confronted with his past actions and laughing about it, or making a joke about it, or whatever he did (I haven't seen any footage) just shows that he maybe, unlike most of us, hasn't matured any since high school.

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On this we do agree, but I'm mystified as to your problem with people being concerned over the original incident itself.

Shadow_Ferret said:

I don't need empathy. I was one of those "different" kids who was bullied by the jocks or the special people.

As I said, those things happened back then.

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I was bullied in elementary school, not high school. I was one of several targets of a notorious bully. Many years later, I learned that she had very likely been the victim of sexual abuse in her home, which would account for her violent acting out. As I was also a child myself, I have no idea whether any other adults were aware of her situation at the time. Her suffering did not make her bullying any easier to take, but at least, in hindsight, it had an explanation.

So I wonder, what explained or excused the bullies who picked on you?

What explained or excused Romney apparently fuming for several days over another boy's appearance until he finally raised up a posse to go and rough him up? Whatever excuse it was, he seems not to have found much success in coping with it.

Shadow_Ferret said:

As I said, those things happened back then.

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Doesn't mean we can't be upset about it.

Hell, I'm still upset about the Whiskey Rebellion!

muravyets said:

So I wonder, what explained or excused the bullies who picked on you?

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It was a part of growing up. They were just there. They existed as part of your life. You learned not to take a certain way to school. Or to avoid a specific hallway in school at a certain time. In grade school, you learned not to be exposed, stay with the group, or play near the playground teacher. Or you learned to run fast. High school was different. It seemed the bullies ran in groups, often part of the football team, or student counsel. They'd hang out at the cool doors, so you'd find other entrances to school, or you'd hang off of school property until the bell rang and you knew they'd be inside going to class.