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The McGlynn 15 May
The girl killed by Barack Obama – she never saw it coming [Graphic Video]
The O’Leary: And you are going to vote for this man???
The McGlynn: Please think of this little one as your daughter. Does anyone in our country care?
Author Archive
11 May
Mitt Happens
***********
HELEN:
Margaret, I just called my friend Patricia to apologize for dipping her hair into that inkwell back in grade school. I feel bad that I did it and I feel even worse that she no longer remembers who I am or that she one time had hair long enough to put in pig tails. We’re getting old, Margaret. And you know what else is getting old? The parade of schmucks who keep running for political office.
The population of the United States is now over 300 million people. That means that every four years, one person out of 300 million gets the honor of being President of the greatest country on the planet. With those odds, you would think the Republican Party could have found someone who wasn’t a dry drunk like George W. Bush… or the bully in high school like Mitt Romney. I know. I know. We all did dumb things when we were young. Youth. I miss it like I miss my waistline. Shit happens… or in this case Mitt happened. “Back in high school, I did some dumb things,” Romney said. “And if anyone was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize for that.” Me too. I really do feel bad about dipping Patricia’s hair into that ink well.
Mitt went on to say, “There’s going to be some that want to talk about high school. Well, if you really think that’s important, be my guest.”
Thank you Mr. Romney, I think I will. I think I will talk about this because unfortunately we don’t seem to have solved the problem yet. Bullying is alive and well today and it is just as inexcusable today as it was 48 years ago. You can send your wife out to the media to laugh about your “wild and crazy” high school years but I wonder how the two of you would have reacted if one of your sons had done this same thing. Wild and crazy? Yes, actually. It was. And it’s even more wild and crazy today that anyone would want to honor you with the highest office in the land. Mitt was the son of a Governor… born into a privileged life. You can’t tell me he didn’t know any better.
Mitt and a group of his friends threw a younger boy to the ground and hacked off his hair while he cried and screamed for help. The younger student was believed to be a little light in his loafers by the way, but Mitt now claims that he didn’t know he was gay. As if that really matters.
Mitt led the charge and did the actual hair cutting. Maybe I am overreacting here, but I think he just might not deserve to be that one person out of 300 million to be President. Believe it or not, lots and lots of people go through their entire school career and never dip another person’s hair in ink or physically abuse another student.
I have said before, I come from a generation that doesn’t really talk much about gay people. I remember thinking that a perfectly lovely word had been ruined. Today, however I say, “Gay marriage?” Why not? Everyone should be allowed to be with the one they love. I honestly don’t understand what all the hoopla is about. If you don’t agree with gay marriage then don’t marry a man who dresses like Rick Santorum or has hair like Mitt Romney. If you don’t like gay people simply ignore them. They probably don’t like you either. If an octogenarian from Georgia can see that, why can’t privileged politicians?
Margaret, I really don’t think this is about being gay or the sanctity of marriage. I think this is about common decency and what we should expect from that one person in 300 million who becomes President. I’ll be the first to admit that I would not make a good president. If ever an example of who not to elect there was, I certainly fit the bill. But let’s slow down for just a second here. He gathered a group of students. They tackled a younger student and while that student cried and screamed for help, Mitt Romney, the assumed Republican nominee for President, cut off his hair because he didn’t like the way he looked. Does it matter if that student was gay? Would it be worse if he was black? How about if that student were a woman? I don’t give a rat’s ass if that student were all three. One in three hundred million. One.
Maybe I am old school, as they say, but I really don’t think that one is forgettable much less forgivable when you want to become President.
No one is perfect. But surely we can elect someone more perfect than that. I mean it really.
MARGARET:
Helen, dear, I think this all has to do with the length of time little Mitt was allowed to breast feed. Or maybe he’s just a asshat. Probably the latter, dear.
11 May
Teenage Mitt Romney assaulted a classmate in high school for being gay & Mitt Romney’s Disturbing Selective Amnesia
Thu May 10, 2012 at 07:30 AM PDT.
Oops. You weren’t supposed to find out about that.
(Matthew Reichbach)
The O’Leary: What a jerk! Was then, is now.
One day after President Obama announced his support for marriage equality, the Washington Post reports on the early days of Mitt Romney’s evolution on equal rights:
Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.
“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.
A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad 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. [...]
“It was a hack job,” recalled Maxwell, a childhood friend of Romney who was in the dorm room when the incident occurred. “It was vicious.”
Some 30 years later, Lauber—who died in 2004—told one of the witnesses to the assault that:
It was horrible … It’s something I have thought about a lot since then.
So, all these years later, is Mitt Romney sorry for assaulting a classmate? Or is he trying to dismiss it as a youthful indiscretion? Nope. According to his campaign:
… the former Massachusetts governor has no recollection of the incident.
How convenient.
Fri May 11, 2012 at 02:12 PM PDT
Mitt Romney’s Disturbing Selective Amnesia
by SJGulitti
Seems that Mitt Romney may be suddenly suffering from a disturbing bout of selective amnesia, apparently he can’t remember having led an attack on another student at his prep school, one John Lauber, where Romney himself cut off the poor soul’s hair. You see Lauber was a nonconformist who apparently marched to his own drummer and this was something Romney and his crew couldn’t abide. Quoting a recent Washington Post article, “Mitt Romney’s prep school classmates recall pranks, but also troubling incidents”: “[Matthew] Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad 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.”
It goes without saying that the above account hardly paints Mitt Romney in a favorable or noble light and even though the incident took place so many years ago and could legitimately be considered to be out of character behavior, the real issue here isn’t whether or not it happened but Romney’s claim that he couldn’t recall the incident. In the ensuing fallout of this revelation Romney, appearing on Fox News, said “As to pranks that were played back then, I don’t remember them all, but again, high school days, if I did stupid things, why, I’m afraid I’ve got to say sorry for it”
First of all it’s highly unlikely that one could ever forget having engaged in such behavior unless, of course, this behavior was ongoing and common in which case Mitt Romney might forget one among many haircuts administered to offbeat class mates as there would be too many to remember in the first place. Also, the fact that five of those who were involved or witnessed the incident possess specific and vivid recollections to this day of the of the attack on Lauber pretty much renders Mitt Romney’s claim that he can’t remember the incident to be suspect prima facie.
So what we’re left to consider is two very unsettling questions related to Mitt Romney’s character. First, is he so driven by ambition as to totally disregard the truth in an attempt to skirt clear of this issue? What about the presumption of honesty that the voter is to have when assessing the qualifications of a candidate for president? Are we to assume in the final analysis that Mitt Romney is no more honest than the guy running a 3 Card Monty game on the street even though he’s got better credentials and wears well tailored suits? Secondly if Romney really and truly couldn’t recall an event as brazenly bold and dramatic as attacking another student and cutting off his hair, how can we rely on him to remember those important facts about economics, foreign and domestic policy, national security and military matters that are the daily bread of the president of the United States?
I’ll be the first to admit that I was no saint in high school or immediately thereafter and I myself pulled off a few bold and brazen stunts, some of which were truly stupid if not physically reckless, one or two which could have been considered borderline criminal. However, it doesn’t take too much of an effort to summon up memories of each and every one of them. I for the life of me can’t believe that Romney could, as if by magic, fail to remember an incident so searing in its boldness as the attack on John Lauber. Prior to this story the rap on Romney was that he was too rich to relate or too socially inept to come across as the proverbial “guy you’d like to have a beer with.” However this disturbing story from the past doesn’t bode well for Romney and only serves, along with others, to further keep him from getting back to the one topic where can actually take Barack Obama to task and that’s talking about the economy. In a campaign where negative attacks have already begun and will only intensify, Mitt Romney’s prep school past has just yielded up another negative image that belies his squeaky clean persona and will surely be used against him somewhere along the road to the 6th of November.
Steven J. Gulitti
5/11/12
Sources:
Mitt Romney’s prep school classmates recall pranks, but also troubling incidents; http://www.washingtonpost.com/…
Bullying Story Spurs Apology From Romney; http://www.nytimes.com/…
Apology Tour; http://thepage.time.com/…
Mitt Romney’s prep school classmates recall pranks, but
also troubling incidents
By Jason
Horowitz,
Published: May 10 | Updated: Friday, May 11, 1:00 PM
BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. — Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break
in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious
Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick
buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong
at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a
soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his
nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys
school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t
having it.
“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney
told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to
Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenage son of Michigan Gov. George Romney,
kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.
A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate
quad 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. The men have differing political
affiliations, although they mostly lean Democratic. Buford volunteered for
Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008. Seed, a registered independent, has served as a
Republican county chairman in Michigan. All of them said that politics in no way
colored their recollections.
“It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,” said Buford, the
school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber.
Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was “terrified,” he said. “What a
senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.”
09 May
A Dumb War
Dear The O’Leary,
In the airport in Atlanta yesterday, I happened to be standing next to some American soldiers, wearing camouflage, on their way to Afghanistan. They knew the name of the province that they were going to, but they were arguing over what part of the country that province is in. One said the east. One said the south. One said the west. One of them thought that their destination was near Kandahar, but then they started arguing over where Kandahar is located.
I hope that they get it all sorted out before the shooting starts.
If they don’t know what part of the country that they’re going to, then what are the chances that they speak the local language? (There are 48 different native languages in Afghanistan.) What are the chances that they know anything about Islam? (Which is practiced by more than 99% of all Afghans, language differences notwithstanding.)
To little fanfare, President Obama announced last week that he signed an agreement to extend the U.S. military occupation of Afghanistan for twelve more years. No one noted the irony of this, since under our Constitution, President Obama can be President for no more than another 41/2 years.
Also under our Constitution, a treaty requires the concurrence of two-thirds of the Senate. (Article II, Section 2, Clause 2). No one in the Obama Administration even took a stab at explaining why this agreement with a foreign power was not being submitted to the Senate for concurrence. But the reason is obvious: the Senate would not concur.
Also under our Constitution, you will search in vain for any provision that authorizes a lengthy military occupation of a foreign country. In fact, the Constitution does not authorize a standing army, much less an army standing in Kabul. In the Bizarro world in which we live, we have 27 Attorneys General challenging the constitutionality of 35 million Americans getting health coverage, but no one challenges the constitutionality of an undeclared war (see Article I, Section 8 on that) that has now entered its second decade.
Presidential candidates Obama and Clinton obviously were separated by race and gender, but one of the few things that separated them on policy was Clinton’s vote in favor of the war in Iraq, contrasted with Obama’s 2002 statement that the war in Iraq was “dumb.” This is what State Senator Barack Obama said, in October 2002, in the Federal Plaza in Chicago:
I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.
What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.
That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.
Barack Obama was talking about the war in Iraq. But let’s be honest. At this point, after 11 years of pointless, fruitless, endless war, doesn’t all of that apply equally to the war in Afghanistan?
Courage,
Alan Grayson 
8419 Oak Park Road, Orlando, FL 32819
Paid for and Authorized by the Committee to Elect Alan Grayson
03 May
The Peace Prize War President
David Bromwich
Professor of Literature at Yale
Posted: 05/ 3/2012 2:41 pm
President Obama, it has been said, is a master of having it both ways. Nowhere is this truer than in foreign policy. He ended the torture regime at Guantanamo, in line with rulings handed down by the Supreme Court. At the same time he assured impunity to the lawyers who justified torture and the agents who executed it. He publicized his intention of closing the prison itself as a matter of principle; but when resistance sprang up, he scuttled the plan. To facilitate the extension of the war in Afghanistan, he allowed American diplomats and military officers not to inquire too closely into the treatment of enemy combatants at Bagram and elsewhere.
Obama initially condemned enhanced interrogation of terrorist suspects because, under the American constitution, suspects have legal rights and all torture is illegal. Meanwhile, he maintained his credit as a war president, not distracted by constitutional niceties, by ordering terrorist suspects to be killed rather than tortured. (We are talking about persons named as suspects, on evidence seen only by a few, not murderers found guilty by a legal process.) The killing is done by drones; and the drones, for now, seem very far away, though we know they are coming closer.
What are the refinements that especially recommend this new method of killing? The president’s counter-terrorism czar John Brennan recently estimated the civilian casualties from drone attacks at zero. Impartial judges have estimated civilian casualties somewhere between 400 and 800 (including 160 children). Practically speaking, these deaths are the cause of an anger that every day gains fresh recruits for the terrorist organizations.
But the drone killings and black-ops killings are done, at least in part, for a domestic audience. The aim is to establish President Obama as prudent, calm, and canny about the ways of modern war. Yet there is something ominous about these administrative killings, something beyond the dissociation between the killer and the killed. The method — which has been declared legal by a secret finding — seems likely to spur feelings of impotence more desperate than those a strong army inspires in soldiers of a weak one. Drone killings are more economical, it is said, than a shooting war; but may they not be more subtly murderous in their effects?
George W. Bush strove to present a strutting aggression as manliness. It won him re-election in 2004, but has lost him respect already among the near posterity of a decade after. Until last week, Obama’s most conspicuous difference from Bush on foreign policy had seemed to be his determination to talk softly no matter how aggressive the actions he ordered. His recent ad celebrating the killing of Osama bin Laden changes that picture. The president, in his bid for re-election, has stepped forward now as another hero of martial virtue; and he deploys as his central exhibit the sort of black-ops killing that alongside reliance on drones has marked the distinctness of his war presidency.
Obama’s command call for the Navy Seals to launch the attack in Abbottabad is interpreted in the text of the ad as an embodiment of the same qualities George W. Bush claimed for ordering an army of a hundred thousand to invade and occupy Iraq. Bush launched a war of aggression. Obama violated the national sovereignty of another country. Both did it to “protect” America — a word that Bush abused to cover such actions, and Obama has ratified the abuse. In this killing game, Bush may be the more literal-minded player; but we should not confuse the difference of manner with a difference of morale. The game itself is base. The effect of the ad will be to repel many Americans who deprecate a contest to decide who is the coolest killer. On the minds of those who admire such actions and such players, the effect will be something worse.
“Ends are literally endless,” wrote John Dewey; and he meant that you must show the nature of the ends by your practice and selection of means. Is it true for Obama that every means is a means to another means? Saying is not doing. If you re-christen the Global War on Terror as “the war we’re in,” but broaden the field of action and run executive-command black ops at an ever lengthening tether from the Constitution, you do not act to improve the prospects for peace or the fortunes of liberty.
It would appear that the case is complicated for Barack Obama by the particular way he looks at the world and himself. He is tempted to suppose that the nature of an action is changed by the fact that he is the one who performs it. He seems to have believed, for example, that he was ministering to human flourishing in some way by allowing the honor of the Nobel Peace Prize to be bestowed on him in 2009. The prize was announced and accepted before Obama had done anything to advance the cause of peace. (In 1973, the North Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho was awarded — jointly with Henry Kissinger — the Nobel Peace Prize for the Paris negotiations, but Le Duc Tho refused it on the ground that he had not yet been able to deserve the honor.) When Obama addressed the international gathering at Oslo, however, he spoke not with humility but with magnificent condescension. The new American president rode a high horse into that ceremony, as presider over an American beneficence that had blessed the world by military protection ever since the Second World War. He alluded to the great exemplars of non-violence, Gandhi and King, not with deference but with a quiet superiority. Unlike those theoretical idealists, said Obama, “I face the world as it is.”
Of course, that is the usual profession of realists. But coming from the most powerful man in the world as it is, it was a deeply puzzling declaration. Does Obama merely face the world, and reflect its contents as they are, or does he play a distinct role in determining the shape of the world? His anti-Romney ad on the killing of bin Laden wonders if Mitt Romney would have had the self-command to order the killing at all. Is this a demonstration of Obama’s capacity for facing the world? His apologists deny that there is anything extraordinary in it: he talks like this, or his campaign does, in order to prove that he is the conventional politician whom the average American wants and the politician whom the mainstream media expect in foreign policy. The usual expectations require the ad to say what it says: that Barack Obama is a gunslinger with excellent luck and dead aim.
The best and worst that one could say about George W. Bush was that he was all of a piece. Obama, on the other hand, impels us continually to ask who or what he imagines that he is. In his campaign to win the election as a war president, he flatters the worst vices of chauvinism and panders to the most vulgar and brutal idea of the qualities that define a leader and the actions that ennoble a country. No alchemy of eloquence can atone for the confession of moral surrender involved in such a boast.
Pragmatism in politics is a word that covers a multitude of evasions. At its most extreme, it may suggest the authorization or support of a wrong, by whose enactment alone an important right is banked on to emerge. Yet the Obama taunt against Romney’s presumed unmanliness is not pragmatic even in that questionable sense. It is a case of a political act that is purely wrong. No conceivable right, however distant, can be counted among its consequences. If Romney wins the election, the challenge will stick in his mind: an incitement to prove himself by one-upmanship, against the killer prowess of Bush and Obama. And if Obama wins? By this appeal to the Republican household gods of war and warcraft he will have made it harder for himself to steer away from war — supposing that to be his intention. The words and images of an ad like the one described above do not face the world as it is. They change the world as it is. They change it for the worse. They are a means to another means.
