Mitt Romney (says he) doesn’t remember

Mitt Romney claims he doesn’t remember being a lead participant in a bit of gay-bashing in his high school days. But…five of his former classmates don’t seem to have such memory problems. The following is from a Washington Post story linked at the end of this blog post:


QUOTE:

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall…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 identified.

:UNQUOTE.

I don’t believe Mitt Romney is lying when he says he doesn’t remember this incident. I believe something much worse – that he’s either dissociative or in denial. So profoundly in denial – because that’s not who he believes he is – that it’s been driven from his memory.

I wish Mitt really was lying about not remembering. For then he could simply have said:

“Yes, I do remember this and other incidents that I’m ashamed of. But that was almost 50 years ago, and I had long ago asked the Lord for forgiveness. I think you’ll find my behavior since then to have greatly improved. So please take this for what it was: Part of growing up, part of my life experiences. I hope you, as responsible members of the press, won’t obsess on this. Too much is at stake in this election to allow my childhood mistakes to drive the great challenges that face us as a nation into the background.”

But Mitt is in denial. He really can’t remember. And that is a testimonial to an ego that simply has to believe in its own virtue. I wonder what else Mitt had managed to submerge to the depths of his subconscious. This is no small question, since it regards a man whose worldview and moral outlook were shaped by a religion in which he was no mere bystander. I wonder if Mitt Romney, who is so logical and (as he himself admits) is so numbers-driven, had managed long ago to submerge his conclusions about the absurdity of his own faith. Men who secretly suffer from crises in the faith of their fathers often take solace in numbers. And that makes it easier to forget they ever had doubts in the first place.

Mormonism is so blatantly false, it’s no wonder he doesn’t speak of its tenets. He can’t, without risking a rude confrontation with what he knows and has successfully buried all these years.

When his wife Ann recently said, “There’s a wild and crazy man inside of there just waiting to come out,” she might have said more than she’d intended. There’s a thing about wild and crazy men just waiting to come out – when they do (say, by going on a rampage), those nearest and dearest to them always say the same thing: “I never saw that coming.” Translated to a grander scale, which is the stage upon which US Presidents operate, that could be a bloody disaster.

Steven Searle for US President in 2012

Founder of The Independent Contractors’ Party

“I would much rather think Mitt is lying.”

Contact me at bpa_cinc@yahoo.com

Source of quotation in the second and third paragraphs above:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mitt-romneys-prep-school-classmates-recall-pranks-but-also-troubling-incidents/2012/05/10/gIQA3WOKFU_print.html