Blowing His Stack
Frank Rich is pretty sick. His latest column looks at Joe Stack, the guy who flew his plane into an IRS building:
Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.” But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner.
This is outrageous. There are nuts of all stripes who do stupid, sickening things. It's cheap and underhanded to try to tie them to a movement you don't like, even if there's some overlap in their politics. The Tea Party protestors are unhappy about a lot (though not as nearly as angry as the protestors we saw during the Bush years, seems to me), but they do not support violence against the government (and they rarely mention taxes, actually).
Indeed, even if Stack had written "I am doing this solely because of how I've been influenced by the Tea Party Movement" he would still be the one responsible.
But in fact (as a secondary matter), Stack's confused rant sounds more left than right. He attacks big business, the drug and insurance companies (whom he says murder tens of thousands every year), the Church, George W. Bush and capitalism.
Meanwhile, Rich, in his general sliming of anti-government sentiment on the right (I guess dissent is no longer patriotic), is apparently blind to (or perhaps approves of) all the anti-government sentiment on the left. He doesn't even seem to be aware that there are those on the left who say Stack makes a lot of sense.
P.S. Rich adds "In the heyday of 1960s left-wing radicalism, no liberal Democratic politicians in Washington could be found endorsing groups preaching violent revolution." This is either a lie or stunning ignorance. It's quite easy to find Democrats who supported violent groups back then, and it's a tradition that has continued to this day.
(I wasn't planning on giving examples, since I found this point so obvious, but I stumbled onto a column which did.)
posted by LAGuy @ 12:11 AM
4 Comments:
Even if some conservative pundits repeated it until we were sick of it, it remains true that there don't seem to be any Republican parallels to State Senator Obama's chumminess with Bernardine Dohrn and her husband Bill Ayers. (For some reason, her husband Bill Ayers got much more press -- maybe because the pundits felt a woman was intrinsically less scary -- but Dohrn was the leader of Weatherman back in 1969-71, complete with bombings, communist manifestos, and a new Hand Salute involving holding up your fingers like the tines of a fork, to celebrate Charles Manson's gang sticking a fork into Sharon Tate.)
And back in 1992, I was astounded when candidate Jerry Brown publicly lauded the gay activist group "Act Up", which had recently desecrated the cathedral in New York City to protest the Catholic Church's view of homosexual sexual activity.
Trent Lott got in big trouble for saying it would have been good for Strom Thurmond to win in 1948, and if he really meant it, I would consider that totally unacceptable. But how many on the left lost their positions for holding positive views of Henry Wallace, the other fringe candidate from 1948?
Simple Dohrn and Ayers and ACT UP represent the prevailing opinion today (although extreme versions) generally the vietnam war is regarded as wrong, civil rights protestors were right and the Church has a bad record on gays except for the ones in their employ they were covering up for.
Strom Thurmond evokes memories of segregation which don't have any acceptance
Funny there was no outrage when rightwings and even Sen scott brown equated Stack's action with the antitax movement. Guess its OK to exploit a violent crazy when its used to support your position but bad when a violent crazy is used to criticize your position
First anonymous, they're still unrepentant terrorists, who aren't on record opposing their violent revolution against the U.S.
Second anonymous is just weird.
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