Your intrusion into the Raskins’ grief was out of line, Matt Gaetz. The list goes on to encompass the millions of unknown parents and siblings who bravely have forged on, electing to consecrate their lives and work to the memories of their lost loved ones. Yet he did live, and wrote some of his more important works before his own death in 1910. “It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live” Sam wrote.

Meningitis took the life of Susy Clemens, Mark Twain’s cherished daughter, while Sam and Olivia were away in Europe. Less than a year later, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln lost their beloved 11-year-old son Todd to typhoid fever in February 1862, in the midst of the Civil War. “And death shall have no dominion,” wrote Dylan Thomas, and for most bereaved people, this is at least partly true. History and common sense make you look like a fool, Matt, perish the thought. The Raskin family made their announcement to combat stigma. Depression is a leading symptom of chronic bipolar disorder. The Raskin family courageously announced that Tommy, a Harvard Law School student, had suffered from serious depression for years. Some 46 thousand Americans killed themselves in 2021. Lesser forms of mental illness affected a fifth of the population. The National Association on Mental Illness reports that more than 14 million people suffered serious mental illness (incurable brain diseases such as schizophrenia) in 2021. Statistics on mental illness vary, as do definitions of mental illness. Now they-we-Congressman Raskin-suffer a fresh round of gratuitous stigma, via your clueless and falsehearted claim that such bereavement robs survivors of the ability to function. Often these people are shunned into the bargain by a society that assumes they are crazy themselves, or somehow to blame. Your real victims are the millions of Americans whose lives have been scarred by a child’s mental illness and/or suicide. Here, though, is the nub of it, Matt: Congressman Raskin will surmount your venomous hypocrisy. representative for Maryland’s 8th congressional district Still, you were quoted as saying, “We’re proud of the work we did on January 6th to make legitimate arguments about election integrity.” Doesn’t this make you-oh, a proud far-left anti-fa zealot? You kept your own hide safely distant from the violence that day, yet you somehow divined without evidence that it was a bunch of far-left (“anti-fa”) zealots who triggered all the trouble. I think it makes him look at everything in these very like, dark and severe ways.” “I think that he takes that trauma and he associates it now with his work in the Congress to such an interwoven way that he’s unable to do the congressional experience outside of just the dungeon of that personal trauma. You put on your Sigmund Freud pants, Matt, to explain to us laypeople why Jamie Raskin must retreat from the public scene: Now you want Jamie Raskin out of Congress-you know, for his own good. No slur, no lie, no amount of hateful falsity in your public past can match your soulless verbal mugging of Congressman Raskin, a man of rare high character and rarer courage who just now is performing the definitive public service of his life: holding to account the moral miscreants like you who thought, on January 6, 2021, that it would be a good idea to follow Donald Trump’s goading and vandalize the United States Capitol building in Washington. To an appalling extent you’ve succeeded.Īnd now you have broken new mud.

Your horde has pumped these rancid values into the public discourse over the last decade you’ve done your best to normatize them. You know these levels, Matt, because they are where you and your fellow congressional cretins live like feral cliff-dwellers. There are levels of character destruction, of barbarism and bullying, of abusive self-degrading malice. The thrust of them was that Jamie Raskin was no longer able to discharge his congressional duties. Marjorie sat mooing with approval at your side as you spoke, occasionally belching out a supportive comment of her own.ĭo you recall those remarks, Matt? I do. The podcast was hosted by your spirit animal, Marjorie Taylor Greene. They were aimed at the bereaved Congressman Jamie Raskin, whose son Thomas, on New Year’s Eve 2020, committed suicide. I think I’ll call you “Matt.”) You voiced them during a podcast on June 8. (I can’t bring myself to call you “Congressman” Gaetz, because “Congressman” is an honorific, and I have never discovered anything in your character that suggests honor. Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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