American Right-Wing Terrorist Wins Praise Among Tea Party Movement

An image produced by the Tea Party movement. A reflection of just how mentally depraved such people are.

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On Thursday, Texan Joe Stack flew his small private aircraft into an Austin building housing the tax collection agency the Internal Revenue System. One person was killed (along with Stack, of course) and two were hospitalized in the early morning attack.

Initial responses conjured up, naturally, the images of 9/11. But this was an act of domestic terrorism by an American right-winger bearing a grudge against the government.

In his suicided note, Stack justified the necessity of bloodshed in order to awaken the American people to the alleged abuses of the state. Stack cited high taxes and the complexity of the tax code, along with the bailout of Wall Street and (in a leftist tone) the inability to secure universal health care amongst a list of grievances.

Stack act is unquestionably terrorism and the ravings of a paranoid Mad Men. His act also does not exist in a bubble, but has come about in a climate that has encourages such extreme opposition to Barack Obama's government. Just like Timothy McVaugh of the Oklahoma City Bombing (which killed 168), Stack has been encouraged in his belief by extreme right-wing rhetoric. After the Waco, Texas disaster and the passage of the gun-control Brady Bill, many right-wing commentators sought to frighten Americans by warning about a new Big Government that would kill them with impunity if need be, take away their guns and undermine if not strip away liberty. It only takes one admittedly already depraved person to then believe he needs to take actions against the government through terrorism.

Stack has spent the last year listening to the likes of Glenn Beck who five-days a week preach that Obama is a radical socialist in the mold of Mao who wants to introduce central planning in the United States and indoctrinate Americans into socialism - and that the left-wing is not just wrong but dangerous and whose lust for power will stop at nothing. Obama and been dehumanized into an evil character where rational disagreement is no longer the rule, but the Glenn Becks have sought to engender knee-jerk (and often racist) and fanatical opposition to anything Obama. Even to Republican favored Obama schemes like tax cuts the Middle Class. This is how vile and deranged and delusional these people are in their hatred.

Part of this mentality is that American right-wingers often believe that elections confer no legitimacy to rule unless a Republican wins. Whenever a Democrat wins they engage in the most extreme attacks from Day One and refuse to even pay respect to the new president. In 1993, the Republican leader in the House Dick Armey stated that Bill Clinton is not 'their' president - and on the floor of Congress, no less. Such extreme had never been heard before in Congress to declare that it is not even a question of one's legitimate disagreement but simply that an elected president is not one's own. Right-wingers do not want to play by the rules and often want to do nothing more than destroy Democrat president from the start because they cannot accept that they lost. The temerity is such that when Democrats even dared to complain about the Supreme Court vote handing Bush the presidency, the right-wingers accused Democrats of being sore losers. The mentality of the right-wing in American in its extremism, its hatred, its delusional righteousness knows no low.

Thus it should not surprise us that in this attack against a government headed by Obama many right-wingers are now fans of terrorism:

Praise for Stack appeared to be largely anonymous, but because it appeared online so rapidly it quickly threaded itself into his Google cache -- popping up on right- and left-wing sites that tried to bat it down, as well as white-supremacist ones that did not take such pains.

"God bless Joe Stack an american hero" a person writing as "summit02," posted on the blog of Tea Party Patriots, an umbrella group for the conservative movement. "Thank you Joe for your heroism in the fight aganist the evil elites. that are destroying america," the person wrote.

On Thursday, a "True American Hero" Facebook group hailing Stack was quickly deleted. On Friday, the message persisted with the fan page "There should be more people like Joseph Stack" and the group "Joseph Stack: the Patriot." Countering them are the groups "Joseph Andrew Stack is a Terrorist" and "Joseph Andrew Stack is NOT a Hero." Each had fewer than 100 members -- proof of the maxim that online you can find supporters for almost anything, but not necessarily many of them.

To be fair:

Some in the Tea Party condemned Stack as an anarchist.

"After reading Mr. Stack's February 18, 2010 statement, it is evident he supported anarchy," said Heather Liggett of the Austin Tea Party in a statement to InfoWars. "The Tea Party movement does not advocate anarchy. The Tea Party movement believes in our founding principles so eloquently written in our Constitution."

But they have created the climate and they bear some burden for the attack given their lunatic opposition to Anything Obama and the refusal to even accept the legitimacy of the first black president by bringing up questions on his birth certificate. They want no debate, but simply to destroy. This is a fruit of that ideology.