This should be the final word on “working class hero” Joe Stack

...but unfortunately this interview with the son of the man Joe Stack MURDERED won’t be:

“Part of being an American, whether you agree with what’s going on in the government or not is you pay your taxes. This isn’t someone who couldn’t afford to pay his taxes. He had an airplane and an almost $300,000 dollar house, and we’re talking about what, three or four thousand dollars that he didn’t want to pay? That’s ridiculous.”

Video of the interview with Vernon Hunter’s son at the link. Digby has more on the ~~working class hero~~ disgruntled, homicidal, private-plane-owning tax cheat here. And here’s a good review of some of the deranged “patriots,” including Stormfront, who are celebrating this barbaric act.

UPDATE: Here’s an article about Vernon Hunter, the man...

Neighbors say Vernon Hunter was the kind of guy who offered trash collectors Gatorade on hot summer days.

“He was a very spiritual man, kind of the life of the neighborhood,” said Darren McDaniel, who has lived two houses away since their homes were built in 1996. “We were all sort of like his kids.” [...]

McDaniel said their street won’t be the same with Hunter gone.

“Everybody loved him in the neighborhood,” McDaniel said. “He’s in a better place, but the neighborhood is going to seem a little empty without him.”

MORE: Here’s another interview (including video) with Ken Hunter...

Ken calls his father a real American patriot; a man who decided to serve his country as a soldier, putting his life in danger to defend freedom at a time when other men his age were dodging the draft.

In the same breath, Ken calls his father’s attacker, Joe Stack, a coward.

Ken has read posts on-line calling Stack a “hero” who “struck a blow against the government”. He knows of the sites set up on web pages like Facebook.com where people have memorialized Stack and written tributes to him.

Ken sees no honor in what Stack did.

He sees no honor in a man trying to burn down his own home while his family was inside. He sees no honor in a man who can’t pay his taxes but owns a plane, deciding to fly that plane into a building in an effort to claim innocent lives.

He sees no honor in anything that Joseph Stack did on Thursday.

All he sees now is a life cut short. The life of a retired Vietnam veteran and grandfather who will never see his six grandchildren grow up.

p.s. I may update this later when I have more time because I’m getting a little pissed off about some of the empathetic horseshit I’m reading about Stack from My Progressive Betters*.

Posted by Kevin K. on 02/20/10 at 12:17 PM • Permalink

Categories: News • Politics • Television • YouTubidity •

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I’ll say it again: As someone who’s written a ton of suicide notes, I’m calling out Stack’s entire “manifesto” as a lame attempt to graft a “folk-hero” rationale onto the reprehensible actions of a pathetic, self-pitying fuck-up.

Stack wasn’t Dillinger. He wasn’t Clyde Barrow. He wasn’t John Henry with his Hammer. He was a complete dick who was neither cagey enough to be a successful criminal, nor man enough to go quietly and crash his plane in an empty field so at least his wife and child could collect the life insurance.

This was not a “political” act. It was just run-of-the-mill cowardice.

Comment by StrangeAppar8us on 02/20/10 at 12:53 PM

Strange: +1000

(Yes, that’s a hint.)

Comment by Kevin K. on 02/20/10 at 12:55 PM

Naturally, the one person added to Stack’s “body count” turns out to be a nice, hard-working veteran with a family who will miss him terribly. This is why terrorism is an atrocity, no matter what the cause.

Comment by Betty Cracker on 02/20/10 at 12:58 PM

Mr. Hunter didn’t deserve this. His family didn’t deserve this. Nobody deserved this. Stack was a guy who refused to own his own screw-ups, and made everyone else pay for them, including the family he should have been protecting.

There is absolutely no doubt that the IRS drives decent people to suicide, and more routinely than most of us know. But that wasn’t the case here, and the murder of innocents is never justified, regardless. Anyone who tries to make Stack out ot be a hero is more deluded than he was.

Comment by StrangeAppar8us on 02/20/10 at 02:36 PM

Just for the record, since even Strange was confused by it, I was applauding his comment while taking a very cryptic swipe at someone who most certainly wouldn’t have.

Comment by Kevin K. on 02/20/10 at 02:50 PM

Well, to be fair, he had no idea how many people he would take out in his statement against the system, but they were all part of the machine that ruined his life, anyway; so what? They were just eggs for his populist, anti-tax omelette.

Having just made my way through Stack’s screed, I must say that he manages to feel immense empathy for himself, but I did miss the part where murdering his wife and child was also justified by the inequity of the tax code. I know it must be in there somewhere; after all, he had time to pen side-tributes to himself such as:

On the subjects of engineers and dreams of independence, I should digress somewhat to say that I’m sure that I inherited the fascination for creative problem solving from my father. I realized this at a very young age.

That’s the sort of problem-solving Mohammed Atta would have applauded.

Comment by Mrs. Polly on 02/20/10 at 04:10 PM

+1000 Mrs Polly.

I welcome your anti-tax omelettes.

Myself, I’m so anti-populist, that I may even try to create something, rather than flying an airplane into it. I inherited that kind of fascination for creative anti-populism from my mother.