Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Child Torture Round 2 Why do we see this again in Romney's campaigns?

Everyone knows by now that a Republican Arizona sheriff is gay, and was accused of threatening a Mexican boyfriend with deportation.


http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/25/nation/la-na-sheriff-babeu-20120226

What you may have missed, because it was buried in the fourteenth paragraph of a 19 paragraph article, is that he was Mitt Romney's Arizona campaign co-chairman.  Before that you would have found out that the accused supported John McCain in 2008, Romney's opponent, something which is very old news and hardly worth mentioning.  In paragraph 19, you find out that the accused was raised Catholic, normally not reported in such a story, which further distances him from Mormon Mitt Romney.

This is an egregious example of media bias in favor of Romney, since this occurred shortly before Mitt Romney was to be tested in the Arizona presidential primary, and yet how Sheriff Babeu got the Romney job is not mentioned.

It turns out that is only the first step in the scandal.   On election day, but late in the day, the LA Times finally published this article, indicating this is the second time a high Romney campaign official has been associated with a disciplinary children's school or camp that used methods described as torture and bearing suggestions of pedophilia.

 http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-paul-babeu-arizona-sheriff-20120228,0,6363707.story

The accused allegedly had an inappropriate relationship with a seventeen year old student at a Massachusetts boarding school, and used "disciplinary" measures such as making kids strip and wear only a sheet as punishment.

All this might be excused as an unfortunate but understandable issue for the Romney campaign, or any campaign hurriedly thrown together in the heat of battle, if it hadn't all happened before.

In 2007, Robert Lichfield resigned as Utah Finance Chairman for the Romney campaign.  He had run a website to match students with boarding schools, and he ran a strict discipline boarding school in Utah.
Like Babeu's school in Massachusetts, it involved procedures which were deemed to be torture.

http://lizditz.typepad.com/i_speak_of_dreams/2007/06/robert-lichfiel.html

Randall Hinton, Lichfield's partner was eventually convicted of kidnapping, child endangerment and other charges.  Notice that this article also tries to distance Romney from the charges by saying a Romney relation was one of the whistleblowers.

http://lizditz.typepad.com/i_speak_of_dreams/2007/01/randall_hinton.html

As with Jerry Sandusky's Second Mile, there were allegations of child sexual abuse.

The question is, was Babeu's school part of Lichfield's network?  The lawsuits against Lichfield's company started before he was Romney's  Utah finance chairman and he only resigned when Hinton was convicted.  Is Babeu part of a ring of such people who are still associated with Romney?  Was Sandusky part of the Romney campaign too?  Why did a humor website claim Sandusky was running for office on an anti-Mitt platform? Why the sudden need to distance the accused child molester from Mitt Romney?

http://theskunk.org/2011/11/sandusky-to-enter-republican-primary-race/

What is going on here? After the 2007 experience, why does Mitt Romney still have an issue with his campaign officials? Isn't it more normal to put a few locally prominent suits like Congressmen and Governors on your team and leave the work to anonymous low level workers, where you put all your drifters and grifters?

Romney, unlike the usual politician, doesn't share the limelight with anyone.  We saw that when he took over the Salt Lake organizing committee, when it was too late to move the Olympics anywhere else, and yet Romney publicly called for prosecution of his predecessor.

Here is another way to spot a psychopath.  Interviews with murderers have convinced people that there are some key things that they have in common in telling their stories.  They call these the psychopath speech patterns.


Among the most important are a) a trail of "uhs" as the desired facial expressions are framed under questioning; b) use of past tense to distance the perpetrator from the crime; c) use of  subordinate clauses to show necessity of crime within a plan; and d) focus on physical needs as opposed to higher order issues.

Now go back and look at Romney's explanation of tying his dog on the roof:


He had a pat fast-talk response, but still managed 11 uhs in trying to present it and still seem pleasant and dog loving.  He used the past tense to describe the incident - except when he said "his name is Seamus and we love the dog,"  Seamus must have died long ago, making this present tense usage absurd.  However, Romney described the roof incident as if happened a hundred years ago. Romney did not use many subordinate causation clauses, but did use a number of subordinate phrases like "in terms of Massachusetts" when speaking of the fact that he broke the law. Furthermore, he focused on the physical situation of the dog to interpret that the dog was okay with the action, not the issue of the dog's terror that would have been the primary concern of a dog lover.

In short, the response was the same response a murderer would give when talking about his crimes.

This is all old news and what difference does it makes?  Well it makes a difference if Romney is president and staffs high positions with people who are associated with a pedophile ring or is even a pedophile himself.  It makes a difference if Romney has no professional approach to staffing but works his gut.  It makes a difference if Romney is an unusually bad judge of character.  It makes a difference if Romney is so unwilling to hire strong leaders who might outshine him or talk back to him that he staffs his cabinet with underqualified or unqualified people.
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This is not a side issue, although the press are conspiring to keep it so.  It is a bread and butter reflection on his judgement.


 







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