Via Matt Lewis, here’s the dilemma for Romney. As sleazy and pitiful as that WaPo piece was, how much effort do you want to put into countering it? If you ignore it, it’ll be consumed by the next sleazy, pitiful, distracting news cycle in a day or two. If you start squabbling over it, which it sounds like they’re preparing to do, it extends the story’s shelf life and maybe helps it reach low-information voters who will otherwise be hibernating until September.

Tough call:

White, in an interview with ABC News, said that he is “still debating” whether he will help the campaign, remarking, “It’s been a long time since we’ve been pals.” While the Post reports White as having “long been bothered” by the haircutting incident,” he told ABC News he was not present for the prank, in which Romney is said to have forcefully cut a student’s long hair and was not aware of it until this year when he was contacted by the Washington Post.

According to White, he knows of several other classmates that have also been approached by the campaign to counter the article. White declined to name the fellow classmates.

But then there’s this:

One former classmate and old friend of Romney’s – who refused to be identified by name – said there are “a lot of guys” who went to Cranbrook who have “really negative memories” of Romney’s behavior in the dorms, behavior this classmate describes as “evil” and “like Lord of the Flies.”

I thought we were going to spend the next six months having a dumb conversation about whether Romney’s too rich and square and “out of touch” to get the economy back on track. But no, between this and the mind-numbingly stupid Seamus attacks, we’re actually going to have a dumb conversation about whether Romney was some sort of psycho several decades ago. So maybe it is worth pushing back, just because there’s apparently more water left in this story still to be carried for O.

Since our media is terrible and juvenile and therefore, to a great extent, so is our politics, I guess we have to play ball and note the instances of bullying, some petty and some a bit less so, in O’s book. Luckily he grew up, matured, and learned a valuable lesson: When you want to push someone around, get one of your political cronies to do it for you so that you can stay “above the fray” and “post-partisan.” Take a memo, Mitt.