Joe Stack

Googling “Vernon Hunter” on Monday night I was stunned by how little the national media, beyond Bunch, Crooks and Liars, the Associated Press and ABC’s “Good Morning America,” had paid attention to Stack’s victim. “GMA” seemed to write about Hunter  because the show featured Stack’s daughter from his first marriage, Samantha Bell, calling her father a “hero.” To her credit, Bell retracted her statement, and labeled Hunter the hero, when she learned about the man her father killed.

Stack’s daughter may be forgiven bad judgment in the wake of losing her father. American politicians can’t. I cut new Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown some slack the other night — Brown compared Stack to the “frustrated” voters who backed him last month, “who want their elected officials to be accountable and open and talk about the things that are affecting their daily lives.” But I haven’t seen Brown retract or clarify his comments since Hunter’s identity was discovered, and that’s disappointing.

Far worse than Brown is Rep. Steve King of Iowa, who embraced Stack’s grievances four days after his attack and three days after Hunter’s body was identified:

“I don’t know if [Stack's] grievances were legitimate, I’ve read part of the material. I can tell you I’ve been audited by the IRS and I’ve had the sense of ‘why is the IRS in my kitchen.’ Why do they have their thumb in the middle of my back. … It is intrusive and we can do a better job without them entirely.”

Human Events editor Jed Babbin should win the bottom-feeder award for joking about Hunter’s killing at that confab of crazy, CPAC. Talking about his friend Grover Norquist, Babbin quipped:

“I’m really happy to see Grover today. He was getting a little testy in the past couple of weeks. And I was just really, really glad that it was not him identified as flying that airplane into the IRS building.”

I’m sure the Hunter family enjoyed the humor.

The Christian Science Monitor reported that posters at the racist site Stormfront.org are Stack fans, with one proclaiming “The Guy is a true Hero!” Since we don’t yet know the nature of Stack’s anti-government beliefs, I won’t file him with the anti-government, anti-Democrat and anti-Obama armed lunatic fringe that’s emerged since we elected our first black president. Yet. But it is certainly worth noting that Stack just happened to kill a black man; and the right-wing racist anti-Obama Birther who struck the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., also killed a black man, Stephen Tyrone Johns.

Without proven connections between the killings, it’s just a sad coincidence. But let’s mark it here, and hope there’s no reason to identify any kind of pattern. Let’s hope that fervently. My condolences to the family of Vernon Hunter.

Letter: Vernon Hunter wasn’t just a name to me

by Christine Edgar

I grew up with Ken, one of Vernon Hunter’s 6 kids, and I first learned about the tragic events when Ken posted on Facebook that he was racing to Austin hoping that by the time he got there, his father would have been found alive. We were all stunned to learn that Vernon was the one person killed. It just seemed so random and unfair.

Ken’s politics and mine are diametrically opposed to each other; Ken’s a staunch conservative, and I’m nearly as far to the left as he is to the right. Most of our interaction on Facebook until now has been political debate. But when this happened, our differences seemed inconsequential, and all that mattered was that Ken is a good man who had been a friend to me in high school, and that his beloved father had been taken from him by a domestic terrorist. It’s very distressing that some people are now hailing the man who killed Ken’s father as a hero.

I disagree with Joan Walsh that Vernon Hunter’s race might have had anything to do with why he died. I find it highly unlikely that Stack would have targeted his attack that specifically. But I do think that Mr. Hunter’s race might partly explain why so little has been said about him elsewhere in the media. Thanks, Joan, for putting Vernon Hunter’s face and his name forward. He was not a symbol. He was a person with family and friends who loved him, and who have been devastated by his loss. 

I had a few minutes of near-pique, though, as many people complained about the failure to call Stack a terrorist – even though his “manifesto” suicide note made clear his act was political protest, and his target was the IRS. It’s pretty obvious that if his name was Yusef Muhammed Stack, a lot of people would be using the T-word about what happened in Austin, very quickly.

But it was the Obama administration, with local officials, who first announced that the attack wasn’t terrorism. Obama disappoints me sometimes, but I’m not quite ready to blame his White House for a racial or religious double standard here; I believe they wanted to calm fears of a coordinated attack. Plus, when Maj. Nidal Hasan opened fire on fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, I was among the people arguing that the terrorism label was irrelevant, even a distraction from understanding Hasan’s motives (and the Army’s failure to read many warning signs).

So even though the right wing brayed about the reluctance by Obama and some in the media to label Hasan a terrorist – and even if none of them were clamoring to pin such a label on Stack now – well, conservatives bray, and they’re frequently wrong. I can have some intellectual consistency on this issue, at least.

It’s still hard not to see some of the right’s extreme anti-government rhetoric in Stack’s rant. As Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center noticed almost immediately, there was another plot to bomb the Austin IRS offices, back in 1995, just after Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, by an anti-government extremist who was sentenced to almost 75 years in federal prison. And shockingly, Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown seemed to count Stack among the “frustrated” folks who elected him last month, in an interview with Fox News’s Neil Cavuto (h/t Crooks and Liars). The Fox host asked him a boilerplate question about what he made of the day’s sad news, and Brown opened his mouth and placed his foot squarely between those pearly whites:

“I don’t know if it’s related but you can just sense not only in my election and being here in Washington, people are frustrated,” Brown told Cavuto. “They want transparency. They want their elected officials to be accountable and open and talk about the things that are affecting their daily lives. So I’m not sure if there’s a connection there, I certainly hope not. We need to do things better.”

For now, I’m going to file that under inexperience or rookie jitters, the kind of thing that led Brown to tell a national audience on election night that his two daughters were “available.” I don’t think anyone in elected office, not even the most right-wing Republican, will claim Stack as part of his or her team.

As I watched people lurch around all day looking for a political peg for Stack’s violence, I was reminded of how finding a scapegoat for crazy violence comforts us. If we find someone to blame (the right’s frequent response) or some social cause or illness (the things we like to look for on the left), then we can explain what happened, and maybe even prevent it next time. We can detain suspicious people without charges, in Cheneyworld, or solve the social problems that make killers act out (that’s usually my response).

Of course – politics returns, briefly – the right’s impulse has mostly prevailed, at least since 9/11. It was hard not to notice that mixed in with headlines about Joe Stack this morning (California time) came the news of Dick Cheney’s surprise appearance at the Conservative Political Action Committee, fresh from his ABC News interview in which he admitted to being a war criminal. But I’ll grant that’s just coincidence, too. Cheney’s loathsome enough without tying him to a sad crazy guy like Stack.

At the end of the day, literally, it’s not clear there are any larger lessons to be drawn. Ideology aside, Stack tried to make himself out as a casualty of our economic system, and Lord knows, there are plenty of them out there. Yet he still owned a private plane, learned how to fly it, and the house he allegedly set on fire looked pretty nice. Sometimes crazy people are mostly crazy, and a crime is just a crime. We may find bigger answers one of these days, but so far we didn’t find them on Thursday.