Randi Rhodes Forums

Mitt Romney's 1981 arrest and 4 other times he lost his cool
The Week - Tue, 8th May 2012 11:55 AM
Believe it or not, the unflappable Romney was once arrested for disorderly conduct. And that wasn't his only "Mitt-frontation"

Fans of truly explosive political fireworks may have been disappointed when the seemingly unflappable Mitt Romney won the Republican nod to face the famously no-drama President Obama. But flashes of Romney's well-guarded temper have made cameo appearances on the campaign trail, and BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski just unearthed a gem from Romney's past: A three- decade-old arrest for clashing with a law officer. Here, a look at that tale and four classic "Mitt-frontations" (as his family calls them):

1. Facing a "disorderly conduct"
arrest

This story first surfaced in Romney's doomed 1994 bid to unseat Sen. Ted Kennedy, Kaczynski says: In 1981, Romney was putting the family boat into Lake Cochituate, an hour outside of Boston, when a park officer told him he couldn't because the license looked painted over. If he launched, he'd face a USD 50 fine. "I was willing to pay the fine," Romney told The Boston Globe. But the officer returned as Romney put the boat in and, visibly angry at being ignored, handcuffed Mitt, who was "dripping wet in a bathing suit," and booked him for disorderly conduct. Romney contested the arrest in court, threatened to sue, and got the arrest dismissed and sealed. "He did not have the right to arrest me because I was not a disorderly person," Romney told The Globe.

Right, I guess "laws are [just] for little people and suckers, aren't they?" says Kaili Joy Gray at Daily Kos.(More)
http://us.m.yahoo.com/w/legobpengine/ne ... s&.lang=en

Mitt Romney’s prep school classmates recall pranks, but also troubling incidents
By Jason Horowitz, Updated: Thursday, May 10, 7:07 AM
BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. — 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.

The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another. Four of them — Friedemann, now a dentist; Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer; Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor; and David Seed, a retired principal — spoke on the record. Another former student who witnessed the incident asked not to be named. The men have differing political affiliations, although they mostly lean Democratic. Buford volunteered for Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008.

Seed, a registered independent, has served as a Republican county chairman in Michigan. All of them said that politics in no way colored their recollections.

“It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,” said Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was “terrified,” he said.

“What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.”

“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 pickins,” said Friedemann, then the student prefect, or student authority leader of Stevens Hall, expressing remorse about his failure to stop it.

The incident transpired in a flash, and Friedemann said Romney then led his cheering schoolmates back to his bay-windowed room in Stevens Hall.

Friedemann, guilt ridden, made a point of not talking about it with his friend and waited to see what form of discipline would befall Romney at the famously strict institution. Nothing happened.

Romney is now the presumed Republican presidential nominee. In a radio interview Thursday morning, Romney said he didn’t remember the incident but apologized for pranks he helped orchestrate that he said “might have gone too far.”(Much more at link)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ ... print.html

(Snip)Sometime in the mid-1990s, David Seed noticed a familiar face at the end of a bar at Chicago O’Hare International Airport.

“Hey, you’re John Lauber,” Seed recalled saying at the start of a brief conversation. Seed, also among those who witnessed the Romney-led incident, had gone on to a career as a teacher and principal. Now he had something to get off his chest.

“I’m sorry that I didn’t do more to help in the situation,” he said.

Lauber paused, then responded, “It was horrible.” He went on to explain how frightened he was during the incident, and acknowledged to Seed, “It’s something I have thought about a lot since then.”

Lauber died in 2004, according to his three sisters.

I just posted a different version of the same, and almost did put it in this thread. Great minds. Well, this is big enough. Romney, the anti-It Gets Better guy.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... -M3TG7.DTL





bigot scumbag punk

I really cannot stop thinking about this - primarily the hair cutting. Short of some activities that led to criminal charges, I'm just having a hard time thinking of a public official who's been involved in something this revolting.

Really - I'm quite obsessed with it. To be the leader of a pack that grabs someone, holds them down and then forcibly cuts the victim's hair. And to decades later refer to it as a "prank?"

I'm even willing to, for the purposes of discussion, avert my eyes from the gay-bashing this clearly was. Let's just pretend these guys looked at it as "teasing" someone for simply having a hairstyle that wasn't in vogue at the time. Even in those circumstances, I find this so brutal and savage that I can't articulate it.

Listen, I did and said shitty things as a kid. But the extent of this ... invasion. This really disturbs me. This is a fucking pack animal, albeit a leader of the pack.

Through history, and throughout seemingly countless cultures, forcibly cutting a victim's hair has been a tool to take power from a victim, and a means for an oppressor to assert power.

I don't expect this incident to sway any undecided voter, and reflexive Republicans will have no trouble accepting the "boys-will-be-boys with their pranks" line of response. But this really, truly disturbs and sickens me. If I were so twisted and full of myself as kid to have been involved in something like this, I cannot even imagine being able to discuss it as an adult while holding my head up. My shame would be palpable.

Hope I didn't make that merge too confusing but with only the one post on the boat incident and the rest on Cranbrook the merge made too much sense.

he just gets more and more creepier that mit.

here's this just fer scuzz:

i think it works.

I love that one, but this is the first time I noticed that while FUDGE is obvious at his right shoulder, just off his left shoulder it also says "steamer"