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Distraction Watch: MSM puts out hit pieces on Romney’s teen years while economy burns

Surprised? Don’t be. The Washington Post leads the way with hit piece number one [1]:

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.

Uh huh.

There are two reasons this “story” is coming out now: 1) Mitt Romney is now the presumptive nominee for the GOP, and 2) his opponent President Obama has just gone on the record as supporting gay marriage. What better way to pit the two against each other on the national stage in such a dramatic fashion on a sensitive social issue, and especially in light of the emphasis newsrooms have put on reporting incidents of bullying nationwide? Romney “bullied gays in high school” while President Obama “took a courageous risk [2]” by coming out in support of gay marriage.

This is not, I repeat, not a coincidence, people. Yes, the same mainstream media who were so reluctant to do any digging at all on then-Senator and candidate for President Barack Obama’s background as an adult, much less his background as a student [3] are eagerly latching onto the story about alleged high school pranks Romney and friends supposedly pulled on “feminine” men. ABC News was next [4]:

A high school classmate of presidential candidate Mitt Romney [5] told ABC News today that he considers a particular prank the two pulled at Michigan’s Cranbrook School to be “assault and battery” and that he witnessed Romney hold the scissors to cut the hair of a student who was being physically pinned to the ground by several others.

“It’s a haunting memory.  I think it was for everybody that spoke up about it …  because when you see somebody who is simply different taken down that way and is terrified and you see that look in their eye you never forget it.  And that was what we all walked away with,” said Phillip Maxwell, who is now an attorney and still considers Romney an old friend.

“I saw it with my own eyes,” said Maxwell, of the anecdote first reported by the Washington Post [6].  Maxwell said Romney held the scissors helping to cut the hair of a student, John Lauber, who was presumed to be gay and who had long hair. “It was a hack job … clumps of hair taken off.”

Maxwell said he held the boy’s arm and leg, describing he and his friends as a “pack of dogs.”

Asked if Lauber was targeted because he was gay, as reported by the Post, Maxwell said, “We didn’t know that word in  those days … but there were other words that were used. We weren’t ignorant, we just didn’t use the current names for things.”

At least one family member of Lauber seems disgusted that an incident that happened over 40 years ago in high school is now such a burning issue in 2012:

Christine Lauber, older sister of John Lauber, who died in 2004, told ABC News [7] she had ”no knowledge” of the incident involving her brother and Romney. But she said she was at college at the time of the incident, so at the time the brother and sister were “doing our own thing.”

“Even if it did happen, John probably wouldn’t have said anything,” she said.

“If he were still alive today, he would be furious [about the story],” she added with tears in her eyes. ”It’s two 16-year-old kids at school. And it was 40 years ago!”

The family of Lauber will reportedly be issuing a statement soon [8] about the story.  I hope they rip the WaPo and ABC News – and any other news outlet that deemed this story “relevant” a new one.

This story reminds me of the still-unsubstantiated “affair” hit piece the NYT pushed [9] in 2008 not long after it became clear that John McCain would be the presidential nominee for GOP.  And in 2004, the MSM’s TANG hit on President Bush backfired over the forged documents controversy that blew up in the faces of Dan Rather and CBS [10] as a result of a investigating digging and detective work done by the new media [11].  Also, let’s not forget about the various irrelevant hit pieces on Sarah Palin in the fall of 2008, such as stories about much her wardrobe cost, her ownership of a tanning bed, etc.

The left’s/Democrats’ attempt at using the “Romney is cruel to dogs” theme over the “strapping their dog in a carrier on top of their vehicle for a road trip in the 80s [12]” lost traction when it was revealed – again by new media [13] – that President Obama admitted in the past to actually eating a dog.

Prepare yourselves for more of this “season of silly” nonsense in the coming months, my dear readers, as the mainstream media once again tries to cover up for a President who has done about as much good for this country in the last 3 and a half years as he had in the years leading up to him running for President.  This is only the beginning.