Amy Davidson wants to see contrition:
What one does as a teen-ager does not need to mark a person or a politician for life. We can all be stupid. For Senator Rand Paul, it’s Aqua Buddha; for Senator Robert Byrd, it was, more darkly and at a more mature age, his affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan. It took many more years than it should, but Byrd learned how to talk about that in a way that suggested understanding and repentance. Both of those are necessary.
Drum's judgment:
[D]escribing how he treated both friends and non-friends while he was growing up is fair game. It's partly a window into Romney, and partly a window into the era and culture that he grew up in. But pretending that this makes him an anti-gay bully today isn't. He's got decades of adult experiences that tell us what kind of man he's become. That should be enough.
Dreher, who doesn't let Romney off easy, nevertheless feels that the WaPo is out of line:
Let’s say for the sake of argument that Obama was a horndog in high school, like many American teenage males. Are we supposed to derive a lesson about how he treats women, or his moral integrity, based on how he behaved at 16?
Josh Marshall focuses on Romney's response to the story:
What strikes me most about this story is Romney's intense equivocation. First he didn't remember the incidents. Then he apologized to anyone who was offended but without saying he remembered anything specific. Then he said that he definitely didn't know or think the kid they attacked was gay, even though he apparently didn't remember the attack. None of that really adds up. And I think this is long enough ago that if Romney just came clean and said it was almost 50 years ago and he regrets it that would be sufficient for most people.
Jim Burroway takes issue with Romney's apology:
This apology doesn’t sound like it came from a responsible adult who committed an assault and reflected on it for almost five decades afterward. It sound more like an apology from an eighteen year old kid who was dragged to the headmaster’s office after having just been caught leading a sight-impaired teacher into a closed door. And like most apologies from eighteen-year-old kids caught red-handed, it’s weaselly and pathetic.
Chait, meanwhile, has an alternative theory:
Maybe Romney didn't hate gays — maybe he just hated hair. Or, other peoples' hair, anyway. Perhaps that is the deeper fixation: It is not enough for Romney to have perfect hair. Others must have terrible hair.
The Dish 