Witnesses: Romney bullied gay student in high school

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Not all people are who they seem to be and Mittens Romney is no exception as evidenced by his erstwhile friends and their claim that they witnessed the Mittmaster bullying a gay student. Now it’s true that people do change as they age and mature but sometimes they just learn to hide things better. As I watch and listen to Romney’s words in the interview I can clearly see him as a homophobic bully. Here’s the story from ABC News:

Mitt Romney is struggling to get beyond a story about the time he bullied a gay student at a boarding school four decades ago.

The story, reported by the Washington Post, gained traction and credibility as Romney’s high school friends spoke on the record to corroborate the account of the candidate as a teenager cutting a gay student’s hair while he was pinned to the ground.

“I saw it with my own eyes,” Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer who was Romney’s high school pal at the elite Cranbrook School in Michigan, told ABC News. “It was a hack job … clumps of hair taken off.”

Romney said in interviews on Thursday that he didn’t remember cutting off John Lauber’s hair while the student cried. He laughed off questions about it but also apologized for “dumb things” he did in high school and claimed that homosexuality was the furthest thing from his mind.

Republicans have questioned the timing of the Post’s story, which was published the day after President Obama said in an interview with ABC News that he thought gays should be allowed to marry one another. Christine Lauber, the older sister of the bullied student, John Lauber, who died in 2004, told ABC News that she spoke with the Post last weekend for its story.

She also said that she had “no knowledge” of what happened at Cranbrook, because she was in college at the time. The Lauber family has said it won’t comment beyond a statement saying that “the portrayal” of Lauber is “factually incorrect.”

“When I saw the look on his face, it was a look I’ll never forget,” Maxwell said. “This was bullying supreme.”

Romney’s campaign and even his wife have countered criticism of him as a stiff candidate by saying he has a prankster side. But Thursday night, the campaign published statements from two of Romney’s Cranbrook classmates who said the Republican has a sense of humor but isn’t mean.

Democrats have been delighted by the way the story has played out, circulating news clippings to reporters and highlighting the most damning quotes aimed at Romney, such as Maxwell calling the bullying “vicious.”

Romney is scheduled to give four interviews with news stations in North Carolina on Friday.