Monday, May 14, 2012

Romney Apology Raises Troubling Questions

You may recall that I hold the opinion that going back into candidates' childhoods and even college years is stupid. We all realize that whatever mistakes we made growing up, that's how we learned to be adults. So if Mitt Romney harassed a gay kid when he was in prep school, I sincerely believe it's a non-issue NOW. Similarly I don't care what Obama's grades were in college. Good grades aren't a constitutional requirement for Presidency.

It's the things you do now that illustrate your character.

So here's what Mitt Romney did last week.

“Back in high school,” Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said today, “I did some dumb things, and if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize.”

At the same time, Romney maintained in an interview on Fox News Radio that he couldn’t recall the incident for which he was apologizing: As reported in the Washington Post, the accounts of several then-teenage classmates of Romney at the all-boys Cranbrook School in Michigan recalling him and a group shoving and cutting the long hair of a student presumed to be gay.

“I certainly don’t believe that I thought the fellow was homosexual,” Romney said of the fellow prep school student. “That was the furthest thing from our minds back in the 1960s, so that was not the case.”
So what does this say about Mitt Romney?

1. Whether he did something or not, he'll apologize for it. Happy now?
1a. He's not the kind of guy who would remember whether he beat up a kid in prep school. Either he beat up so many of them that he can't pick one particular one out, or - well, that's really the only possibility if he's telling the truth.
2. He'd rather not tell you whether he thinks it's wrong to beat up a fellow student; he's just sorry if YOU think it's wrong.
3. He uses the term "fellow" in conversation, even though he is not Mr. Peanut.

So, judge him accordingly.

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