“Mitt Romney has a uniform fetish,” Lawrence O’Donnell teased going into a break, returning to deliver a segment on Mitt Romney’s college days that promised an exclusive, salacious secret. That secret was that, according to some former classmates, Romney liked to dress up as a police officer, which was a clear outrage given that he did not serve in Vietnam, according to O’Donnell.



RELATED: Lawrence O’Donnell Coolly Dismisses A Barrage Of Crazy From Alex Jones’ Reporter

“When Mitt Romney wasn’t gay bashing kids whose hair he didn’t like, his habit was to impersonate a police officer,” O’Donnell explained. He then added that Romney “Mitt Romney avoided [Vietnam with] four consecutive drafts deferments that he obtained,” and brought in the reporter who brought this story, Joe Conason, in to explain. The key part of Conason’s report is the following:

When Mitt Romney was a college freshman, he told fellow residents of his Stanford University dormitory that he sometimes disguised himself as a police officer – a crime in many states, including Michigan and California, where he then lived. And he had the uniform on display as proof. So recalls Robin Madden, who had also just arrived as a freshman, the startling incident began when Romney called him and two or three other residents into his room, saying, “Come up, I want to show you something.” When they entered Romney’s room, “and laid out on his bed was a Michigan State Trooper’s uniform.”

It was a bizarre attack on Romney, to say the least, reminiscent of the Aqua Buddha attack on Sen. Rand Paul— a claim that Sen. Paul had, in college, forced a girl to smoke marijuana and worship the fictional deity “Aqua Buddha.” It was a weird college story corroborated but not proven by several college folk that was weird and laughable and highly unsettling both in its rise to the national dialogue as well as its inherent existence. It, like the attack on Romney here, also had no bearing on the candidate as a public servant, and didn’t really corroborate or enhance any potential voters’ fears about the candidate. It was just weird.

Whether this story will catch fire is yet to be seen, but being base by its nature, it doesn’t do much to make those who brought it into the light look good. Wasting a segment on Romney doing something dumb in college (or President Obama, for that matter) leaves a very open rhetorical loophole for skeptics to ask O’Donnell why exactly he is wasting our time with this instead of Romney’s jobs record while in office or what he did in his time at Bain or almost anything else on the resume he is using to run for President.

There is a clear reason to talk about Romney being weird in college instead of Romney being incompetent as governor of Massachusetts. The problem with pointing out the many, many things that make Romney an atrocious major party candidate are also the things that make President Obama so unpalatable– the incessant shrewd politicking, the support for money-draining alternate energy projects, the push for cumbersome health care programs that suck the life out of a state budget, embarrassing national party spokesmen like Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Reince Priebus whose hackery is so transparent it makes voters long for the days when Donald Trump was winning election polls. Facing Romney’s demons requires looking in the mirror and facing President Obama’s, too, and it appears that, rather than braving that onslaught, O’Donnell has chosen the “Aqua Buddha” path and publicized a story about some vague recollections from a college classmate about something weird that twenty-something Mitt Romney may or may have not done.

O’Donnell followed up this segment with one explaining how Romney is a “hardcore communist.”

The segment via MSNBC below:







—–

» Follow Frances Martel on Twitter

Have a tip we should know? [email protected]