In that case I will revert to the current common term of use, and refer to the departed as a “snowflake”.
As for consequences, it would be far more accurate to point out that the public opprobrium and the suicide were a “consequence” of the assault itself than of the assault being revealed to the public, as the Wonkette article notes:
I have some sympathy for the deceased’s family. I have very little for those whose first reaction is “Sure, he may have sexually assaulted a teenaged girl and traumatized her for life but why do you have to be so mean to him?”.
Her husband was a first class dick but the poor woman went through a great personal tragedy. I say give her a pass for a month or so and let her work through her grief, then judge her future political aspirations on their own merits.
Oh yes, no matter how good, bad, or indifferent their marriage was her husband just died. “poor woman” is just an expression of sympathy and I think she’s entitled to some of that.
I don’t give a crap about the state of their marriage and to be honest, I have little sympathy for Pastor Rebecca Johnson. Or maybe it’s Bishop Rebecca Johnson. Seems to depend on what part of the Heart of Fire Church website you’re looking at. Hey, maybe she’s Pope Rebecca Johnson now, since I understand there’s been a recent vacancy at that position. Anyway, my point is that she was Dan’s wife and partner for many years and in many things. Things like serving alcohol without a license and serving alcohol to underage kids. Things like knowing he didn’t do the things he said he did because they were married at the time and she would have known if he, oh, administered last rites to every single body pulled out of the World Trade Center.
She’s a part of the fraud that was Dan Johnson and from all available evidence seems to have been a willing co-conspirator.
It’s difficult for me to conjure much sympathy for someone that lives their life the way she and her husband apparently did, no matter the immediacy and context of their personal tragedy. I can understand and acknowledge that she is experiencing a personal tragedy, but that’s about it.
For example, I didn’t feel [del]much[/del]any sympathy for Kim Jong-Il when his dad passed away.
Plenty of political wives are both “political” and “wives”. They may not hold office, but they spend a lot of their days playing many parts of the game.
The single most valuable commodity in an election is name recognition. She’s got that in spades. She may also attract some measure of sympathy vote for the people who are certain her husband’s death was all an evil librul plot.
This Mel Carnahan - Wikipedia is not exactly parallel but it’s close. I was living there then and the turnout to vote for the dead guy / dead guy’s wife was yuuge.
Folks love to throw flowers on a big public memorial. Many votes were just that: figurative flowers on the dead guy’s grave.
As I said in the OP: I don’t think this will go the way she envisions. There won’t be sympathetic people lining up to vote for her because any scrutiny will reveal that she was a part of the fraud and illegality that was Dan Johnson and the Heart of Fire Church.
And hey, if she’s dumb enough not to realize that and she runs, I’ll be happy to point and laugh until the election. That’s why I started the thread, after all.
I’m not arguing she’ll succeed. I was arguing with the people who could see no reason why she’d even want to try.
I suspect her lifestyle and her income depend heavily on remaining in the public eye. So that’s what she’s doing. The old rule about “when you’re in a hole stop digging” is only effective when you can recognize that you’re in a hole. Conmen & sociopaths / psychopaths fall for their own propaganda / reality distortion field every day. She’s probably in the midst of that field right now.
I think the entire premise that the accusations led to his suicide is faulty. And I don’t just mean that in the sense of “It was an illness that killed him.” I mean in the sense that he almost certainly actually did these bad things, and his distress was caused by the fear that he was caught, that everything he had built would come crumbling down because it was based on falsehoods and bad actions.
This is the story of a man killing himself to avoid facing consequences. It is not the story of a man bullied into a suicidal depression.
I find any concerns about the latter with regard to this case to be misguided at best.
This looks to me like a case of someone who committed a horrible crime, was found out, and then killed himself because he couldn’t live with the consequences. I don’t like the idea of “blaming” someone for committing suicide, but if there is blame to be assigned here, it’s on him.
If your proposal is, “don’t accuse someone, even with strong evidence, because the accused might kill himself”, then you ought to consider the fact that keeping these accusations quiet often allows the perpetrator to victimize more people, and furthermore a culture of keeping quiet emboldens other potential perpetrators. Some of their victims might even end up committing suicide as a result. (I mention that since suicide is apparently your main concern here. Preventing rape seems more than reason enough not to keep this sort of thing quiet, regardless of whether it leads to suicide.)
As for the man’s wife, I suspect she’s in denial with regard to what sort of man her husband was – but that’s pretty understandable, given the circumstances. I don’t blame a grieving widow for not believing it; the rest of us have no such excuse.
My suspicion in the Trump era has been that the Keyes constant/crazification factor has shifted upward significantly–that is, that far more people will pull the lever for a Republican when the R after the name is absolutely the only reason to do so.
But Johnson only got 31% of the vote, just a few points up from the original KC of 27%. This is far too strange a situation to extrapolate from it that much, but it’s good to see an election where the batshit crazy Republican didn’t just lose, but got curb-stomped.
I can cut a lot of slack for Rebecca Johnson, the grieving widow. This is a very difficult time for her, in many ways, and how she copes with it privately is her business. But unfortunately, I cannot cut any slack for Rebecca Johnson, the candidate. That takes her grieving into the public realm, with real, public consequences. I would not make her grief a public matter, and I haven’t: She has.
