Mitt Romney already Etch A Sketching his high school 'prank' of assaulting his gay classmate

Mitt Romney: Most likely to still be
a homophobic thug in 48 years
Looks like it's time to shake shake the Etch A Sketch again.

This morning, the Washington Post ran a sickening story about how Mitt Romney, as a teenager, led a posse of his friends in an assault on a classmate presumed to be gay because Mitt didn't like his haircut (petty much, Mitt?). Contacted for comment, Mitt's campaign first tried to make it go away by suggesting it didn't really happen:

[T]he former Massachusetts governor has no recollection of the incident.

Funny how that didn't make people stop talking about the story. So now Mitt Romney has offerend an "apology" that isn't an apology at all:

'Back in high school, I did some dumb things and if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize for that,' Romney said in a live radio interview with Fox News Channel personality Brian Kilmeade. Romney added: 'I participated in a lot of hijinks and pranks during high school and some might have gone too far and for that, I apologize.'

But Romney doesn't really apologize because then he goes back to trying to dismiss the whole thing, since he doesn't remember it. Except that he does remember it wasn't about attacking his classmate for being gay. That part he somehow remembers:

'I don't remember that incident,' Romney said, laughing. 'I certainly don't believe that I thought the fellow was homosexual. That was the furthest thing from our minds back in the 1960s, so that was not the case. [...] But as to the teasing or the taunts that go on in high school, that's a long time ago. For me, that's about 48 years ago. Again, if there's anything I said that is offensive to someone, I certainly am sorry for that, very deeply sorry for that.'

Yes, he's so "deeply sorry" about it that he's laughing (and you can listen here) as he insists he doesn't even remember it happening. But hey, he's sorry if anyone was offended'because that's what you say when you're supposed to apologize for something for which you are not in any way sorry.

But Romney's complete lack of remorse for this incident isn't the worst of it. It's his dismissal of this brutal attack as mere "hijinks and pranks" that is truly sickening. Let's review again just what Mitt Romney did to a classmate because he didn't approve of his classmate's hair:

'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.'

Think about that. Let it sit in for a minute. Smug prep school, son-of-a-governor thug Mitt Romney was so incensed by his classmate's haircut that after obsessing about it for days, he appointed himself the vigilante of his prep school, rounded up a posse of his friends, and attacked this poor kid. Mitt Romney stood over him, ignoring his tears and screams, chopping away at his classmate with a pair of scissors because "He can't look like that. That's wrong."

Haha. Funny prank, Mitt. Hilarious. So hilarious that three decades later, the boy who was attacked said, "It was horrible ... It's something I have thought about a lot since then."

Here's the thing that's most remarkable of all: Mitt wants to brush away this "prank" as some silly little unmemorable incident that happened 48 years ago, but Mitt Romney hasn't changed at all. He's still going around with his posse'the right-wing extremists'bullying and taunting and attacking the people he doesn't like. He's still so incensed at the thought of people being gay that he wants to amend the Constitution to outlaw their relationships.

In almost half a century, Mitt Romney hasn't learned a damn thing. And it's still not funny.