Thursday, February 18, 2010

I find this stuff so you don't have to

A Tea Party Airlines flight made a scheduled stop in Austin, Texas, today, destroying offices of the Internal Revenue Service.

It was a one-way trip. The pilot, disgruntled software engineer Joe Stack, punched his own ticket, according to The New York Times:

The authorities identified the pilot as Joseph A. Stack III, 53, and said his body had not yet been recovered from the building. The other person who was still unaccounted for was described by officials as a federal employee. A long, angry note posted on the Internet, on a Web site registered to Mr. Stack and signed “Joe Stack,” appeared to have been written by the pilot, though authorities had not confirmed the connection. By midafternoon, the company that hosted the site had taken the note down, saying it was acting at the request of the F.B.I.

The note related a long history of financial difficulties and frustrations with the nation’s tax and health care systems and with setbacks like the sharp decline of defense-related employment in southern California in the 1990s and the disruption of air travel after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001. It ended with passages strongly suggesting that its author expected to die on Thursday, including a reference to Feb. 18, 2010, as his date of death.

“I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different,” the note concluded. “I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.”

The F.B.I., which set up a command post near the scene of the crash, has a small satellite office — part of the bureau’s San Antonio field office — in a different part of the office complex where the crash took place.

Bill Carter, an F.B.I. spokesman, said the criminal inquiry was in its early stages. “It’s a fluid situation that’s under investigation,” he said, which was echoed in a statement by Texas Gov. Perry. “There are a lot of indications but nothing definitive yet.”

As for Mr. Stack’s apparent suicide note, Mr. Carter said, “That’s being looked at by our San Antonio office, if that is a real note by this individual.”

OK, PERHAPS I'M being unfair with the Tea Party Airlines crack, though it's tough to pass up a line like that about such a confederacy of paranoid and angry dunces.

But on the other hand, while not all of Stack's rantings in his manifesto of a suicide note match up with what we take to be the "tea party position" (as amorphous a concept as that might be), enough of it sounded familiar enough to make an instant connection.

From Stack's website . . . before the Federal Bureau of Investigation ordered it taken down:








THERE'S ENOUGH in Joe "Blow Your" Stack's dispatch from around the bend to have the "progressives" and the "patriots" arguing forever over who gets to claim him. Me, I lean toward the teabaggers because of one important thing.

They're the ones combining some nasty demagoguery with barely cloaked insurrectionist rhetoric. They're the ones trying to tell you that you're living under tyranny, and that President Obama is Joe Stalin in blackface.

They're the ones -- too many of them, at least -- getting into bed with the "patriot" movement as the far-right "militias" lurk in the shadows.

They're the ones painting any government big enough to deal with a 21st-century nation of 300 million as big enough to be an inherently wicked proposition.

They're the ones with the "Don't Tread on Me" flags from the American Revolution. They're the ones talking about a "new revolution." They're the ones prattling on about "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Yes, Thomas Jefferson was the first to say that -- in 1787. His slave and mistress,
Sally Hemings, didn't know nothin' 'bout no tree of liberty, however -- she was the personal property of Mr. Freedom.

I'M JUST FINE with heaping blame on the tea-party crowd because they've not been particularly particular about the sort of nuts with whom they jump in bed. I mean, what's one more, right?

Maybe I'd feel differently if they were more uncomfortable with the loons. Or if they didn't think their being mad as hell was the basis for anything other than being mad as hell.

Or maybe it was just those "THANK YOU GLENN BECK" signs when they were marching on Washington. Then again, it could have been all those instances of teabaggers trying to see how close they could get to Barack Obama while carrying firearms.


It remains that the tea-party movement once again has mainstreamed the idea of open insurrection against the United States' constitutionally mandated government, and thus has given a homicidal fruitcake like Joe Stack reason to believe his kamikaze mission would somehow be ennobled.

The lunatic is in their heads. And now American blood is on their hands.

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