The Rude Pundit didn't think he'd spend so much of his time writing about dressage, the "sport" in which horses are "trained" (read that as, "have the shit beaten out of them") to prance around like they're walking through fields of, well, horseshit for the delight of people who like that sort of thing.
But there, at the end of the Washington Post article about Mitt Romney's jolly sadism towards prep school classmates, is the tale of John Lauber, the boy who Romney tortured most by cutting off his long hair. Turns out that Lauber was gay, that the long hair did mean what Romney and his fellow savages probably thought it meant. And then there's this: Lauber ended up "taking dressage lessons in England and touring with the Royal Lipizzaner Stallion riders." Let that hang in your brain for a moment or two.
As with many things about Mitt Romney, it's hardly a surprise to learn that he was one of those pampered nancy boys who, because he wouldn't drink or ball like crazy because he'd get raped by the ghost of Brigham Young or however the fuck they threaten Mormon kids, took out his young adult hormonal rage on others around him through "pranks." So he treated a nearly blind teacher like the man was Mr. Magoo, tricking him into walking into a door for the giggling approval of the other prep school bitch boys. Romney was a joker, don't you know?
Sure, sure, there's shit that Romney did that can be chalked up to stupid teenager behavior. But at least two of the acts detailed by the Post would be considered felonies. There's the hair-cutting incident, where scared, closeted, hippie-haired John Lauber, "his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help" as he was tackled and held down by a group of classmates, while "Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors." Romney can't even claim he was drunk or on drugs. He just did it.
Then there's when Romney disguised himself as a cop to harass some fellow students: "Romney flashed a police siren and, bearing a fake badge and cap, approached two friends and their dates parked on a dark country road...Candy Porter, a Kingswood boarder from a small town in Ohio, had a strict 11 p.m. curfew. As Romney and his Cranbrook pals played out the joke, pretending to be shocked over empty bourbon bottles in the trunk, Porter thought of the dorm mothers waiting at the door and the threat of expulsion. 'I just remember being like a deer in headlights,' she said. 'I just remember being terrified.'" Ha-ha. Too bad they didn't have YouTube in the 1960s.
You gotta wonder, though. There's a kind of omerta among boarding school students, like a frat not talking about hazing, so if the multiple sources for the Post article were willing to talk so freely about what a bucket of shit Romney was in school, they must hate him, like on a personal, visceral level. Maybe it's because Romney was, even then, an out of touch elitist who judged those around him by their wealth, as several of the former students note.
The Rude Pundit spoke to his Cheater and the Rude co-host, Jeff Kreisler, who attended Exeter. He said about Romney, "I'm a prep school Ivy League prick and that guy pisses me off...He's the guy who would be home for a break and crashes Dad's car and instead of getting in trouble, he gets a new car. He's the guy that everybody would wish had a horrible tragedy that money and power couldn't save him from just so he could struggle." Romney did have a bad car accident in France when he was 19 where he nearly died. Probably he wanted to buy Citroen and put it out of business in revenge.
As far as "pranks" went at Exeter, Jeff continued, "There was this one kid. He was in my dorm. He was an entitled prick. We cut out magazine letters and made a fake ransom note and put it on the bulletin board saying, 'You're going down.' We had a dorm meeting about it. This other rich asshole, he had like 400 CDs. So we rearranged his CDs and cases. It was a dick move. But we gave him shit, and then we helped him put all of it back in order."
See, for Jeff, "The things that we did showed that the entitled ones could be brought off their high horse. I was never involved in picking on anyone for a weakness." And if someone did go too far? They got expelled. Of course, at Cranbrook, just outside Detroit, what was the chance they were going to boot out the governor's son?
So what does this have to do with the current Mitt Romney? Would you want to be judged by the idiotic things you did in high school? Of course not. But if the right can bring up President Obama's youth in Indonesia as something that makes him un-American, then the left gets to bring up Romney's cruelty as proof that he's a sociopathic dickhead. And, for that matter, it does matter because Mitt Romney has skated through his life with a fake veneer of compassion when he's always been a heartless son of bitch who didn't care about picking on the weak and the isolated. Someone show us a story where Romney stood up to someone more powerful than he was. No, the bullying continued, at Bain Capital, as governor. Fuck that guy. If the Rude Pundit had a time machine, he'd jump in and head over to Cranbrook, 1965, and kick Romney's pussy ass all over the well-manicured grounds of the joint. The best revenge against him is to deny him what he desires most in the world, the presidency.
By the way, Lauber died in 2004. The assault in high school had to have had an effect on him. But, man, what a "vagabond life" he had. After he abandoned the Lipizzaners, "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 story sounds amazing, touching, heartbreaking, exciting. Romney's? Not so much.
Well, at least the NRA can take comfort that Romney's always had a thing for guns:
