Romney and Bullying

When the news broke the other day about Mitt Romney’s high school bullying incident, I was rather annoyed.  As someone said, we probably all did stupid things in high school, so why make a big deal out of this.  That is the point of maturing – we grow out of our high school attitudes and mature into thinking, empathetic adults.  But then I began thinking about some of the other things Mitt has done and said, and in my mind they form a pattern.

 First it was the high school bullying.  A bully cares only about his or her own feelings and doesn’t think, or care, about the feelings of the one being bullied.  Then it was the “dog on the car” episode.  This one bothered me because Mitt’s first answer was not only really ludicrous, but was a lie as well.  He commented that the dog carrier was really airtight.  If it had been airtight, the dog would have suffocated shortly after the trip began.  Further, if it had been airtight, the dog’s effluent wouldn’t have run down the back of the car.  There was no discussion about the condition of the dog at the end of the trip.  Then it was how funny it was that when his Dad closed a plant in Michigan and moved it to Wisconsin, the local band could only play “On, Wisconsin”.  No thought about the people in Michigan who had lost their jobs, or apparent care about what happened to them.  Later, he commented that he really loved to fire companies who were not performing to his standards.  No comment, or thought, about what happened to the people working in the companies he fired.  He had a habit while at Bain Capital of manipulating companies into bankruptcy after having gutted all of their assets for Bain Capital without a thought about what the workers of those companies would do for a living.  And finally, his op-ed piece regarding letting Detroit go bankrupt, knowing full well there was no private capital around to bail them out, and he objected to using tax dollars to do so.  Not a word about the thousands of people who would be out of a job.

Anyone of these incidents, if isolated, would not be enough to form a pattern.  Obviously.  But when one puts them all together they do form a pattern of someone, who in this case happens to be a man, who has absolutely no comprehension that his actions will have a severely detrimental effect on a great number of people.

Martin Bashir had a Democratic analyst, Julian Epstein, on his program today who made the same connection, for which I was thrilled.  At least there is someone who has the ability to get this pattern of Romney’s out into the public forum.  But that was today.

Now imagine this man, Mitt Romney, as President of the United States.  What a chilling thought.