Conformity Commons, Cranbrook (photo: Danielcausa/wikimedia)

Having read and heard a great deal about Romney’s Cranbrook hazing story today, at first I sort of agreed with Greg Sargent that it was an insignificant incident, happened when he was a teenager, etc.  But I’d then have to ask Sargent and others:  Did you really ever do anything like that?   Sure, we’ve all had our youthful misdeeds, but making oneself a brutal conformity-enforcer, and enlisting an elitist posse to sadistically enforce said conformity, is a little beyond the pale, especially when one is the nominee for the party that acts this way about, well, everything.

For today’s Republican Party, attacking random (and insufficiently virile) nonconformists with sharp objects is just what you do when nukes are too impractical.  That creepy, and appropriately Dickensian-named Mourdock, now the Republican candidate for the US Senate from Indiana, is a perfect example of this.  Crowing about his (then-prospective) victory over “moderate” Dick Lugar, boastfully bellowed that his idea of “bipartisanship” was when Democrats, metaphorically anyway, get their hippie, faggy, forelocks chopped off.

The thwarted, small-dicked masculinity that plagues every Republican from Ayn Rand-sodden puberty on is beautifully illustrated by this episode.   Romney, who at 60-something has had sex approximately five times with approximately one woman,  could see the handwriting on the wall way back then, and viciously went after the guy for whom “blow job” would never be something that only occurred in the hair salon.  In this respect, he’s only different from Ken Starr in that he could have gotten laid and therefore calmed down about the whole thing, but chose not to.

Freud is surely rolling over in his grave as he sees how adolescent sexual frustration has captured an entire political movement in the United States, and the crazy and embarrassing ways it manifests itself.  From Abu Ghraib to Joe Arpaio’s pink underwear,  Rick Santorum to Joe Lieberman, and from Marcus Bachmann to Larry Craig, pathetic excuses for manhood are ruefully glancing down there and remembering the time someone said to them “Last time I saw one that size, I was changing a diaper.”  Is it any wonder they’re so angry all the time?

How much more war, torture, misogyny, homophobia, racism, gun violence, and Drill, Baby, Drill, will we have to endure before these creeps get themselves a sex therapist?   Or at least a Fleshlight?

Predictably, Romney’s team has responded to the revelations in the usual Republican fashion: assembling what Ed Schultz derisively called “Cranbrook Veterans For Truth” to smear the (five!) witnesses, and with a slapped-together non-apology apology.  They needn’t have bothered; as others have mentioned and for the reasons I’ve laid out, this anecdote is a political plus for Romney.   Now he’s one of the team.