GOP Rep. Don Young of Alaska isn't just standing by
his assertion to Wasilla High School students that friends and family of suicide victims are to blame because they failed to provide enough support, he's
also now adding "government largesse" to the list of things he blames for suicide.
Asked about the “lack of support” comment, Young expanded on it and added that suicide in Alaska didn’t exist before “government largesse” gave residents an entitlement mentality, according to an audio recording of his senior center appearance.
He also criticized school administrators for supporting students who disrespected him and said he refused to “coddle” them.
But Young didn't stop there, instead launching into a tirade against one of the students—a close friend of a classmate who had committed suicide just days earlier—for having dared to disagree with Young's remarks:
“And then he had the gall to say suicide is a disease,” Young says in the recording. “It is not a disease. It is an illness. Now a lot of times that illness should be recognized by a support group and it should be supported by the teachers that recognize this person has an illness. He needs help. Is it his parents or is it his friends who are not supporting him?”
We could go on for volumes about the number of ways in which Young is wrong, starting with his notion that suicide doesn't reflect any sort of underlying mental health problem (assuming that's what he means by his disease vs. illness dichotomy). And let's not forget that even if his bizarre rant about government largesse were true (
it's not), Young's entire career has been built on pork—making him
Alaska's king of of government largesse.
But Young's comments weren't just technically wrong, they were also a reminder to the world that he isn't merely cold and callous, but that he also takes perverse pride in making cruel statements, no matter how many people they may hurt—and yet his colleagues in the Republican Conference still welcome him as one of their own.