What would we do without Rush Limbaugh to bring perspective to public tragedies? From his show today:

RUSH:  So our last caller from Des Plaines, Illinois, wanted to know, “What is the politics in the coverage of the suicide of Robin Williams?”  Well, I believe there is some.  But I don’t think that the politics is driving it.  I think there was, on the part of media and Hollywood, genuine affection for the guy that is driving it, but there is politics.  If you notice the coverage is focused on how much he had, but it wasn’t enough.

“He had everything, everything that you would think would make you happy.  But it didn’t.”  Now, what is the left’s worldview in general?  What is it? If you had to attach not a philosophy but an attitude to a leftist worldview, it’s one of pessimism and darkness, sadness.  They’re never happy, are they?  They’re always angry about something. No matter what they get, they’re always angry.

They are animated in large part by the false promises of America, because the promises of America are not for everyone, as we see each and every day.  I mean, right here there’s a story Fox News website.  Do you know, it says right here, that the real reasons that Robin Williams killed himself are he was embarrassed at having to take television roles after a sterling movie career.

He had to take movie roles that were beneath him, sequels and so forth, and he finally had to do television just to get a paycheck because he was in so much financial distress.  He’d had some divorces that ripped up his net worth, and he had a big ranch in Napa that he couldn’t afford any longer and had to put up for sale, and a house in Tiburon that he couldn’t afford anymore.  This is all what’s in the Fox News story.

He had it all, but he had nothing.  He made everybody else laugh but was miserable inside.  I mean, it fits a certain picture, or a certain image that the left has.  Talk about low expectations and general unhappiness and so forth.  Right here it says that one the contributing factors to Robin Williams deciding to kill himself was “survivor’s guilt.”  It’s in the headline.

I read that and I thought, “Survivor’s guilt?  What? What survivor’s guilt? What?” So I read it, and it turns out that three of his closest friends, the story says — Christopher Reeve, John Belushi, and Andy Kaufman… The source, unnamed in the story, said that Robin Williams felt guilty that he was still alive while his three friends had died young and much earlier than he had.

He could never get over the guilt that they died and he didn’t.

Well, that is a constant measurement that is made by political leftists in judging the country.  It’s outcome-based education: 2 + 2 = 5.  “That’s fine until the student learns it’s 4.  We’re not gonna humiliate the student by pointing out that he’s wrong.  If he figures it out, cool.  We’re gonna take the fast learners and we’re gonna slow them down so that they don’t humiliate the kids that don’t learn as fast as they do.  It’s just not fair.”

Similarly, a pro-life website, Life News, posted a commentary speculating that guilt over a girlfriend’s abortion decades ago may have driven Williams to hang himself. The site took the article down, presumably after heavy criticism, but TPM has quotes here. Catholic writer Mark Shea observed on his Facebook page:

How to make people who are sitting on the fence about the prolife movement put “1. Avoid prolife people like the plague” at the top of their “To Do” list. What is LifeNews *thinking* to run this ghoulish speculation just to score some points. The man is dead. Show some bleedin’ respect and don’t stand atop his corpse to heap some guilt on him in the service of your agenda. As your own philosophy should tell you, no mere political agenda, even a good one, is more important than a single human life. Reducing the death of a human being to a vehicle for furthering a political goal, no matter how good, does violence to the human person. Human beings are not means to some other end–including prolife agenda ends.

Yes. This.