Mitt Romney, high school bully?

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Well, those bits of Obama's past did get a pretty considerable airing in the 2008 primary and general election campaign, not to mention in some cases in a best-selling book authored by the candidate himself. Not to mention the ridiculous level of attention paid to completely groundless concerns about Obama (birth certificate? closet Muslim?). So I think it's a bit premature to complain about media bias here.
All that said, I doubt this story will have much impact. Voters tend to cut candidates quite a bit of slack for things they did when they were young.

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I'd believe this occurred...but to say it is a hate crime is an incredible leap
Also- and I'm sure I'll get flack for this- bullying is normal behavior...it's wrong and should be punished, but doesn't make one "sick" or  a "psycopatch" if they bully others at a young age

Holding down someone and cutting their hair is not normal behavior.

More to the point, it's not acceptable behavior.

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Of course it shouldn't be absolved...neither should Lincoln's comments on the inferiority of blacks...both are wrong now and were wrong then- but this must be looked at thru a 1965 lens, not a 2012 lens

The key difference here is that Lincoln is no longer alive, and therefore not seeking office. Romney is alive, and seeking office, today, and as a result does need to be judged by the standards of 2012. Presuming this story is true, he should probably offer a more heartfelt apology than simply saying that some pranks got out of hand.

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In addition to everything Lief said, I don't see how the media's supposed lack of coverage of Barack Obama's past is in any way a valid defense of Romney's actions here.

(Also the idea that the media has glossed over Obama's past is absurd - were you people under a rock in 2007/2008?)

...If candidate A is better than candidate B on an issue, you shouldn't go ballistic on A and support B(ignoring B's worse record) because you would be committing an illogical and fallacious act.  Comparison of an apple to an apple is fair game.  

The fact that people know more about Sarah Palin's past than BO's disproves whatever point you were trying to make there.  
  
"We do not really know much about Barack Obama’s constituent record in the Illinois Legislature.

We still don’t know his college transcripts.

We still don’t know what exactly he did for ACORN in his community organizing time.

We still don’t know all the details about the depth of the cocaine use Barack Obama admitted to in his book. Likewise, we know very little about his drug use in high school beyond just a few lines of reporting from 2007.

We know very little, outside of his own autobiographical spin, about how he overcame his rage at white people — something he wrote about, but again, as a politician in an autobiography.

We still don’t know about just how many communists Barack Obama chose to surround himself with.

We still know very little about Barack Obama’s ties to Bill Ayers and the media sure hates to talk about Barack Obama getting his major political start in Bill Ayers’ living room.

But the press is perfectly happy to go back several decades to tell us every salacious detail about Mitt Romney the teenager.

This reminds me of 1992 all over again. The George H. W. Bush team wanted to go focus on Bill Clinton the draft dodger from Vietnam because they couldn’t fight on the economy. Unlike 1992, Barack Obama has the media doing it for him." -EE

Republicans would have more credibility on these issues if they'd been more aggressive in squashing demonstrably false rumors about Barack Obama, like that he wasn't born in the United States or was a closet Muslim. By giving credence to these out-there ideas, they deprived themselves of the room to be successful with more conventional kinds of character-assassination stuff along the lines you suggest, and as they'd done with Bill Clinton in 1992.

[ajb]

In addition to everything Lief said, I don't see how the media's supposed lack of coverage of Barack Obama's past is in any way a valid defense of Romney's actions here.

(Also the idea that the media has glossed over Obama's past is absurd - were you people under a rock in 2007/2008?)

Republicans would have more credibility on these issues if they'd been more aggressive in squashing demonstrably false rumors about Barack Obama, like that he wasn't born in the United States or was a closet Muslim. By giving credence to these out-there ideas, they deprived themselves of the room to be successful with more conventional kinds of character-assassination stuff along the lines you suggest, and as they'd done with Bill Clinton in 1992.

That stuff started in the democrat primary with Hillary and the GOP "establishment" slapped it down more than anyone else including the media and Obama himself. 

There's a lot more to the repubs than their establishment, as we all know.
Besides, on all of this stuff the voters are the final court of appeal. All of the issues you raise were certainly discussed during the 2008 Democratic primary and during the general election campaign. You may think they weren't adequately discussed; clearly, the electorate as a whole didn't agree. And now that Obama has been president for a term, he's rightly going to be judged much more on his record than on who he knew in college, or whether he or George W. Bush did more cocaine. Romney can be judged on his record in office, though that seems to upset him, but it's pretty much inevitable that any questionable episode from a presidential candidate's past will come up at some point. And, as with Obama in 2008, the voters will have the final say.