The Leftist Hate of Joseph Andrew Stack

The editor of the San Antonio Express-News has chimed in on what caused Joseph Andrew Stack III to fly his plane into a building that housed the CIA and IRS in Austin. He writes, "A rising tide of populist anger in this country is driven by bitter sentiment that our system is broken, our leaders unworthy, and the average citizen left to rage helplessly. Stack seems to have been part of that movement."


Typically, the liberal leader of the San Antonio media establishment casts Stack as a rageful populist, an angry tea-bagger who listens to talk radio who hates the Democrats and Obama because he blames them for his personal woes. Rivard warns us that angry tea-baggers are fomenting hatred and murder in our country. He writes, "The truth is we have it good. Not as good as it has been, not as good as it should be in this nation. But the federal government, the Obama administration and its employees are not the enemy. It's too bad Andrew Stack III allowed himself to believe otherwise and succumbed to the politics of despair, and too bad that so many others out there think just like him." 


Watch out for those angry tea-baggers, says Rivard. They'll kill you just as soon as look at you! Forget that the Tea Party movement is perhaps largest spontaneous movement of ordinary people from across the political, social and ethnic spectrum in our history. Yeah. Forget that part. Instead, focus on how evil and angry Tea-baggers are. 

Rivard takes his cues from Dan Turner at the LA Times who wrote a strangely similar opinion piece entitled, "Manifesto of a... terrorist?" three days ago. Turner writes, "Yet it's also striking how much his rhetoric resembles that of a very powerful political movement in the United States: the "tea party" crew." Turner argues that Stack was angry that our government had failed to follow the principles of our Founding Fathers and that his manifesto was a "symphony of Palinism," despite the lack of any reference to the Founding Fathers or Sarah Palin by Stack.

What Rivard and Turner want you to miss, however, is that Stack was a liberal and not a conservative. He was also highly educated and highly placed. Stack was angry that the Democrats and Obama hadn't done enough to move the agenda to the left. He called for a violent revolution against a system corrupt with profits in his pathetic manifesto. He hated capitalism and conservatism. He railed against the Catholic Church, George W. Bush, GM executives and corporate profits in his manifesto. He closes his rant with, "The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed." 


It was Stack's leftist hate that drove him to murder much like Lee Harvey Oswald and or Amy Bishop in Alabama. My thoughts and prayers are with his widow and his daughter that he so selfishly left behind and all those hurt or killed by his hatred.