Portrait of a young man as a bully: Mitt was "vicious"

Jason Horowitz at the Washington Post reports that Romney led what could be described as an assault on a fellow student thought to be gay: John Lauber, a student Cranbrook High School in Michigan, didn't fit the 60s-era mould of "masculinity,":

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.

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.

Further in the Washington Post:

In an English class, Gary Hummel, who was a closeted gay student at the time, recalled that his efforts to speak out in class were punctuated with Romney shouting, “Atta girl!” In the culture of that time and place, that was not entirely out of the norm. Hummel recalled some teachers using similar language.

Rachel Maddow asks why Romney was laughing today about this incident when discussing it today. I am not laughing. Nor was John Lauber or any fair minded person. Very disturbing.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Andrew Sullivan concludes: "Romney was a high school bully of gay or effeminate kids and is also a brazen liar."