too bad Barny Fag set the example...
Posted on 04/22/2009 4:12:20 PM PDT by pissant
It’s the nature of Washington to search for and usually find a politically charged subtext to any news event. But that instinct is never more ghoulish when the event is the sudden death of an important person by his own hand.
David Kellermann, the acting chief financial officer of the troubled Freddie Mac mortgage company, is the latest example of a particular — and particularly macabre — subset of human tragedy: the Washington suicide.
These happen often enough that they follow their own morbid rhythm. The normal human reaction — disbelief, horror, sympathy — is followed almost immediately by the kinds of reactions that are normal only in places suffused by politics and journalism: a rush of suspicion about the motives and speculation over the possible fallout.
Almost immediately after the news broke of Kellermann’s death, Internet rumors ran rampant, with some making references to Vince Foster, the Clinton White House lawyer whose 1993 suicide provoked years of conspiratorial theorizing about whether the Clintons were somehow responsible.
Others invoked the name of J. Clifford Baxter, the former Enron executive who killed himself in 2002 after the collapse of that company. There was dark muttering in that case too, that perhaps Baxter had been killed before he could go public with what he knew about the company. Officials in both cases ruled that the deaths were, simply, suicides.
On POLITICO’s website, the conspiracy theories came out within minutes of the news of Kellermann’s death. “Maybe he was going to come clean and he was ‘Vince Fostered?’” wrote a commenter calling himself “Igu1,” less than 20 minutes after news of the suicide was posted to the site.
“There’s often a reductive, paranoid desire to find a melodramatic assassination behind a complicated, tragic story,” said Bruce Shapiro, executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. Shapiro, who covered the Foster case as a journalist, said he found it particularly unsettling. “The speculation regarding Vince Foster turned out to be a very destructive pathway to go down,” he said. “It was a very angry, speculative set of charges.”
In most cases when someone takes his or her own life, the reasons turn out to be both sadder and more pedestrian than any conspiracy theories.
“Ninety percent of people who kill themselves have a mental disorder, the most common being depression,” says Dr. Paula Clayton, medical director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. “Depression can be fatal: It’s the fourth-leading cause of death in men from age 25 to 60.”
In the current case, the details are still emerging. On Wednesday morning, Fairfax County, Va., police responded to a 4:48 a.m. call from Kellermann’s home. Police found the 41-year-old dead in his basement. He had apparently hanged himself.
There was no immediate explanation for Kellermann’s death, but he had been operating in an extremely stressful environment. Kellermann, who had worked at Freddie Mac for at least 16 years, had been appointed to his current role in September, after the government took over the company and ousted its CEO. But in March, the government’s hand-picked CEO — Kellermann’s boss — David Moffett resigned after a struggle with federal regulators.
Freddie Mac has been at the white-hot epicenter of the nation’s financial meltdown, since it and its sister company, Fannie Mae, owned or guaranteed nearly half of the country’s $12 trillion mortgage market at a time of surging home mortgage defaults.
Whether or not those factors had anything to do with Kellermann’s death, they help form a narrative that could help make sense of an inherently unfathomable act. Frank Ochberg, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Michigan State University and a former adviser to the U.S. Secret Service, says the public often expects Washington stories to conform to certain archetypes they’ve internalized through movies and television. “The audience demands a certain kind of quick and superficial explanation,” he said.
In the classic Washington suicide, the people who kill themselves are involved in debilitating scandals and facing professional ruin, or worse.
Just last year, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the woman known as the “D.C. Madam,” hung herself rather than face sentencing on charges related to running a prostitution ring. “She wasn’t going to jail, she told me that very clearly. She told me she would commit suicide,” author Dan Moldea told Time magazine afterward. Palfrey’s prostitution ring reportedly included scores of high-profile Washington clients. The name of Louisiana Sen. David Vitter (R) was found on Palfrey’s phone list.
In 1996, Admiral Jeremy Boorda killed himself shortly after being informed that Newsweek magazine was investigating whether he had rightly earned two Vietnam War combat decorations that he wore on his uniform. At the time, Boorda was the chief of naval operations and a four-star admiral.
But the suicide that’s generated speculation the longest is the 1949 death of James Forrestal, who had been asked to resign as Secretary of Defense by President Harry S. Truman. In the early days of the Cold War, Forrestal had been an advocate of robust national defense spending and resisted Truman’s efforts to ratchet down America’s World War II military machine. He was checked into Bethesda Naval Hospital for treatment for depression-like symptoms less than a week after his resignation. But nearly two months later, his body was found on the roof of a building several stories below his 16th floor room.
There are still websites claiming that Forrestal did not kill himself but was instead the victim of an elaborate plot.
After today’s tragic news, however, the most controversial comments are likely to be those that came well before Kellermann’s apparent suicide.
In the wake of the AIG bonus scandal, Senate Finance Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said of executives at that bailed out firm, “I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they’d follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, ‘I’m sorry,’ and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.”
After the comment provoked intense criticism, Grassley dismissed it as simply heated rhetoric and not a literal suggestion that financial executives kill themselves.
Grassley spokeswoman Jill Kozeny said Wednesday, “Senator Grassley expressed sympathy today for any family dealing with the tragedy of suicide. He appreciates from his own family history how painful suicide can be.”
“obamacide” “arkancide”
Does o-bozo have to repeat all of the Klintoon stuff?
(I wonder if the guy was on any meds?)
too bad Barny Fag set the example...
Convenient how so many who know so much in Democratic circles suddenly “commit suicide” when major issues arise.......
I agree (with your implied point). Questions about what led to the CFO of Freddie Mac’s suicide would be reasonable even during more stable economic times. Given what’s going on with the economy in general and with Freddie Mac in particular, it would be bizarre if this suicide were chalked up solely to clinical depression.
Sure it was suicide, just like Vince Foster...right?
Who knows what happened, but it seems odd to me that someone would use this method of suicide in his own home, as you said, where his wife would find him. Or perhaps his daughter. Why would he do such a thing?
Yes, it does sound very much like the Vince Foster case. If one of my best friends took his own life, I would want all the investigation possible. But not the Clintons. I would like to think this death will be investigated but I’m not counting on it.
Obama is having a very difficult time attracting qualified and capable people for high government positions.
true its human nature, I know wehnever I misplace something , my first thought after "where is it ?" and I can't find it, is " who took it ?"
. it was interesting how on one of the FR threads today i got pulled in. It went from a news story about "unnattended death" to "unintentional death" to "autoerotic asphyxiation" in no time, then it branched of into something like " he shot himself in the back of the head two times, with his hands tied behind his back and was found hanging with his pants pulled down"
I'll admit , I started to get pulled in until I started checking facts
Apparently, no person with intelligence or sense wants to be a part of Obama’s court.....
The others are too thuggish and dull to care.
I’ll never believe that and I don’t believe the DC Madam did herself either.
this is fishier than a sardine factory
obamacide
Now that the full eight years of the Bush presidency are complete, has anyone run the stats comparing the number of unusual deaths of government staffers with those from the Clinton years?
Off the top of my head I remember Brown, Brown’s assistant, Foster, Boorda from the Clinton years. Don’t seem to remember the same kind of numbers from the Bush years. Or else they hushed it up.
Maybe we should call it Democide.
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