Cauthen column: Don’t throw stones if you live in glass house

In a desperate attempt to find something disparaging about Mitt Romney’s personal life, the Democrats had to go all the way back to his high school days – almost 50 years ago. What they came up with was a highly questionable allegation about a hazing incident in which Romney was supposed to have cut the bleached blond hair of a gay high school classmate.
The accusers had absolutely no hard evidence to back up their allegation. All they had was the word of four individuals, one of them a former campaign worker for President Barack Obama. The alleged victim is now dead, but his family says the incident never happened. Romney says he has no recollection of it.
If Republicans had wanted to find something derogatory about Obama’s high school years, they would have only had to look in Obama’s book, “Dreams From My Father.” In it, he wrote, “I spent the last two years of high school in a daze ... attended classes sparingly, drank beer heavily and tried drugs enthusiastically. I discovered it didn’t make any difference if you smoked reefers in the white classmate’s sparkling new van, or in the dorm room with some brother ... or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school...” In the book, Obama also confessed to “using a little blow” (slang for cocaine) when he could afford it.
His last two years of high school in a daze ... attended class sparingly ... drank beer heavily ... tried drugs enthusiastically ... smoked reefers ... used cocaine? These are far more serious offenses than the questionable hazing incident Romney is accused of.
By choosing such a corrupt and degrading lifestyle during his last two high school years at the prestigious Punahou School in Honolulu, it raises the question of how was it possible for him to have graduated from such an accredited school. Also, were his scholastic and attendance records at Punahou, and his SAT and ACT scores good enough for him to be admitted to the very selective Occidental College in Los Angeles, and later to the highly acclaimed Columbia University and Harvard Law School? Since, for whatever his reasons, Obama steadfastly refuses to release his school records, the answers to these questions will probably never be known. But then, we know very little about our president before he became a senator.
It would appear these Democrats never heard the old proverb that says, “People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.”