Submitted by The Dubya Report on
Romney's "flip-flopper" moniker is well known. But Andrew Sullivan makes the point that in one area Romney has been consistent — "targeting a small minority as a way to advance his own power."
Sullivan's observation comes in the context of the revelation that, while a student at the exclusive Cranbrook private school, Romney "harassed a classmate who later came out as gay."
Sullivan writes:
Should we judge a man today by what he did all those years ago?
Not entirely. He has apologized. But there is surely something here: the notion that being privileged and conformist requires actual punishment of the marginalized and under-privileged; that you pick on younger, weaker boys, not older ones; and that you psychologically traumatize the victim by permanently marking his body.
And this matters because today these attacks on gay kids drive many to suicide, others to despair; they wreck lives and self-esteem. It matters that we know that one candidate for president was an anti-gay bully in high school, targeting a weak and defenseless kid and humiliating and traumatizing him. Today, he does the same thing in a larger, more abstract way: targeting a small minority as a way to advance his own power. It gives me the chills.
Frederick Allen, Leadership editor at Forbes — hardly a bastion of liberalism — joins Time's Joe Klein in taking Romney to task, not so much for the deplorable incident itself, but because
As Klein sums it up, "Romney has a near-perfect record of cowardice, obfuscation and downright lies. It shows enormous disrespect for the intelligence of the public."
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