Authorities say Stack, 53, targeted the IRS office building in Austin last week, killing employee Vernon Hunter and himself, after posting a ranting manifesto against the agency and the government. He apparently set fire to his home before flying his plane into the office building.

Hunter’s son, Ken Hunter, said he’s alarmed by comments that called the pilot a hero.

“How can you call someone a hero who after he burns down his house, he gets into his plane … and flies it into a building to kill people?” Hunter told ABC.” “My dad Vernon did two tours of duty in Vietnam. My dad’s a hero.”

Bell said she offered her deepest condolences to Hunter’s family. She said her father’s last actions were wrong.

“But if nobody comes out and speaks up on behalf of injustice, then nothing will ever be accomplished,” she told ABC. “But I do not agree with his last action with what he did. But I do agree about the government,”

And the original reason for the law, well, one can understand why some people would find it  a little crazy-making.

The law was sponsored by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, as a favor to I.B.M., which wanted a $60 million tax break on its overseas business.

Under budget rules in effect at the time, any tax breaks had to be paid for with new revenues. By requiring software engineers to be employees, a Congressional report estimated, income and payroll taxes would rise by $60 million a year because employees had few opportunities to cheat on their taxes.

Within a year, however, Moynihan changed his mind, and unsuccessfully sought for the law’s repeal.

The Times inexplicably does not link back to Johnston’s  much longer article exposing the law in 1998. In that piece, Johnston extensively documented  the devastating effect the law had on software programmers who wanted to set up their own shop.

As for the accusation, cited yesterday in my post, that the law was originally designed to crack down on illegal tax shelters? Harvey Shulman, a Washington lawyer who Johnston describes as specializing in representing “companies that supported the desires of software engineers to be independent contractors,” sent an e-mail to Salon contesting the rationale.

To the contrary, there was no such evidence (and there are Department of Treasury documents, obtained in 1987-88 under FOIA, which show the true genesis of this law); indeed a Congressionally-mandated study of Section 1706 resulted in an unbiased government report of about 100 pages (1988) which, along with other studies, found that tax compliance by these self-employed workers was actually higher than most other types of workers — and that the enactment of Section 1706 probably did not generate any additional tax revenue and may, in fact, have led to revenue losses (due to the favorable tax treatment accorded many employee benefits which was not accorded to self-employed workers).

It doesn’t need belaboring that 99 percent of the software engineers negatively affected by Moynihan’s amendment to the tax code did not end up as tax protesting kamikaze pilots. But the final kicker to Johnston’s update of the story nevertheless provokes a chill.

On Wednesday, the day before Andrew Joseph Stack III left his suicide note and crashed the plane into the building in Austin, the Obama administration proposed a widespread crackdown on all types of independent contractors in an effort to raise $7 billion in tax revenue over 10 years.

Until Friday morning, that is. Introducing Grover Norquist, the rabidly anti-tax conservative activist, Human Events editor Jed Babbin cracked a joke about the incident. “I’m really happy to see Grover today,” Babbin said. “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.”

Watch video of the joke here (thanks to Media Matters for America for providing Salon with the clip):

As Salon editor Joan Walsh argued Thursday, trying to pin Stack’s actions on the right wing might be unfair — yes, he may have hated paying taxes, too, but sometimes a suicide attack is more act of madness than political statement. Still. You’d think CPAC might be able to find a middle ground between ignoring the incident and making light of it.

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. 

There is a disturbingly familiar echo here of Michael Douglas’ character in the 1993 movie “Falling Down” — the engineer betrayed by larger forces who goes mad, and wonders, at the very end, how he became the “bad guy.” Attack dogs of the left and right will no doubt strive to plug Stack into a politically appropriate box. But good luck with that. Stack’s last words offer as clear proof of ideology-transcending insanity as any psychiatrist could demand. Even more compelling, at the heart of his lament is a grievance so specific as to make larger political themes more or less irrelevant. Judging by his own words, Stack was driven mad by a 1986 change in the tax code governing independent contractors working in the world of high tech.

In the early 1980s, writes Stack, he was a “wet-behind-the-ears ” contract software engineer in Southern Calfornia. As such, he fell into a class of worker that has always enjoyed (or suffered) from ambiguous tax status. A truly independent contractor is responsible for his or her own taxes and other expenses — such as healthcare — and many libertarian-minded software geeks have always liked it that way.

But just as many corporations in the high-tech world have consistently sought their own advantage in pretending that full-time employees were actually independent, and thus could be denied worker benefits.

Somewhere in between were true independent contractors who had long-standing relationships with single companies, and for a while, the tax code recognized this explicitly. There’s a nice (and speedily assembled) treatment of this point in the Tax Foundation’s Tax Policy blog written by Joseph Henchman.

In 1978, Congress passed a moratorium that allowed high-tech workers who had previously considered themselves independent contractors to continue doing so. But then came Stack’s nemesis, Section 1706 of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which removed that protection from certain “technical personnel” — specifically singling out those who provided services as an “engineer, designer, drafter, computer programmer, systems analyst, or other similarly skilled worker.”

Henchman:

As part of the 1986 Tax Reform Act, that moratorium was abandoned for high-tech consultants, who then faced the same employee/independent contractor test as everyone else. High-tech consultants were targeted because there was strong evidence that they were abusing the moratorium as a tax shelter and because it fit a need to offset a separate unrelated tax change in the Act that would result in a revenue reduction.

Was Joe Stack abusing the moratorium as a tax shelter? Or was the amendment to the tax code just a naked government grab for cash from the hardworking pillars of the high-tech economy? Perhaps the avalanche of reporting to come in the days ahead will enlighten us. If you read between the lines of Stack’s manifesto, there are signs that, throughout the years, he may have been inclined to take an aggressive approach to his tax obligations. All we know for now is that the change in his status in 1986 was of seminal, lifelong importance, and he took it very personally. In his own words, the crafters of Section 1706 of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 “may as well have put my name right in the text of [that section]. Moreover, they could only have been more blunt if they would have came out and directly declared me a criminal and non-citizen slave. Twenty years later, I still can’t believe my eyes.”

You don’t have too look far in the software biz to find a libertarian programmer who distrusts the government. It’s a tension built into the industry’s DNA. Thirteen years ago, when covering a federal appellate court decision that Microsoft was illegally denying employees benefits and stock options by claiming that they were independent contractors, I discovered that there was a strong division in the software world over the implications of that suit. If you were a lower-paid temp you applauded the chance for full employment, complete with all the perks. But if you were a higher paid programmer-for-hire you hated how, in the aftermath of the suit, you had to jump through multiple hoops to prove to both the IRS and prospective employers that you were a “real” independent contractor. Protecting other workers’ rights made it harder for you to find your own work. It was crazy-making!

The paradox is hard to resolve: How do you protect the individual freedom and mobility that made regions like Silicon Valley flourish, while at the same time ensuring that employers could not get away with outright exploitation? That same paradox is visible writ large in the current political debate over the role of the government in the economy — it is echoed in the opening words of the manifesto, in Stack’s reference to the principle of “no taxation without representation.”

There is a not insignificant number of Americans who view the IRS as a confiscator of liberty, without accepting the social contract that judges government useful to protecting the welfare of all. Most of us, however, whatever our feeling toward the tax man, manage to negotiate that confusing, contradictory territory without, in the end, flying a plane into an IRS building. Joe Stack blamed an amendment to the tax code in 1986 for ruining his life. But one suspects that the wiring in his brain was the real villain.