Chicken Soup with Mitt Romney the bully...

When high school or college students remind everyone why Columbine is a metaphor instead of a school or a flower, it's a problem. When a sadistic bully stands a step away from our nation's highest office, it's a potential disaster.

A disturbing but not particularly surprising article in the Washington Post describes Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney as a bully. The accusation may be accurate or inaccurate, but Mitt Romney claims he doesn't remember the incident in question.

Yeah...right.

If someone accused me of doing something I didn't do, particularly if that something involved torturing a smaller, weaker classmate my reaction would be simple. I would ask for details. When did this happen? Who was the victim? Did I behave this way as a matter of routine? You get the idea. If the accusation was false I'd clearly state that it was false. I would not, especially as a presidential candidate, claim that I did not remember behaving as a sadist.

I have a good memory. I remember sleeping in a crib and eating in a highchair as a toddler. One of the wooden bars in my crib would loosen up in the winter so that I could twist it around and make a satisfying squeaking sound. During warm weather it tightened up to the point where I could not turn it. As a toddler, I did not understand the ability of relative humidity to expand or shrink wood, but I certainly remember. I also remember with disturbing clarity some of the less innocent incidents of my youth. I won't go into nauseating detail here, but I didn't conveniently forget that they occured. The difference between Mitt Romney and myself isn't just a matter of net income. I occupy an anonymous cubicle in corporate America while His Majesty is actively seeking an obscene amount of political power.

There's more...

What I do not remember about my youth are incidents that happened often enough to be described as routine. I could not, for example descride the bus ride to school on some random date in 1975. I rode to school every day and only rarely did something occur that I'd have reason to remember.

And therein lies the basic problem. If Mitt Romney really doesn't remember behaving as a cocky, sadistic sociopath, then it may have been routine behavior for him. One act of sadism blends into another over the years. Who could be expected to remember a particular one? His classmates remember the incident because it probably wasn't routine for them. Mitt Romney's reaction to the Washington Post article combined with his current screw-the-non-powerful political stance on just about everything strongly suggests that he enjoyed, and still enjoys hurting others, especially those who can't hurt him back. He is probably embarrassed by the public impression that he really does enjoy hurting others but may have forgotten any individual, routine incident of sadism during his youth, and that he hopes the issue will just go away much as our health insurance industry hopes that potentially expensive patients will go away by dying quickly.

From the viewpoint of the world's terrorists, this is just one more example of American character. Electing a cocky, sadistic sociopath to our nation's highest office would surely leave little doubt in anyone's mind that our moralistic posturing about the evils of terrorism is just that: moralistic postering.

Mitt Romney is always welcome to clearly state that he is not, and never was a bully, and that he strongly believes that bullies are a public menace who should be locked up until they're too old to harm anyone.

And pull that vibrator out of your ass before your face gets stuck that way.