Call him what he was - a murderer


What do you call a psychotic killer who flies an airplane into a building?

I call him - Joseph Stack - a terrorist or a would-be mass murderer. But because the psycho wrote that he was doing it in the name of taxation, some people are calling him a hero.

Get real.

Stack flew his Pipe into a Federal building Thursday in Texas, claiming that he was doing it to change government. A flood of stories appeared right after the news of the crash claiming that he had "a point" about the particular code of the tax law he cited in his suicidal ramble. They quieted a bit, but then today a new wave of "he's a hero" washed over the media, partly as a result of his daughter's saying that.

I guess it's understandable that his daughter wants to think well of her dad. But the rest of us shouldn't.

The initial stories showed how pathetically misinformed journalists are when it comes to a) the tax code and b) just about anything economic in this country. Many reporters brayed about the unfairness of the code section he cited - a change decades old that removed one excuse companies used to classify programmers as non-employees.

In other words, companies like IBM and Microsoft had to treat the programmers they hired like every other employee they hired, paying taxes, benefits, etc.

I'm not saying that the programmers didn't continue to get screwed. But it wasn't the tax law that screwed them.

Even if journalists didn't know the tax laws, there were plenty of things about the story that indicated the guy was - well not a hero, and not downtrodden regular guy caught in the grip of grinding poverty brought on by a faceless bureaucracy. By his own admission he'd been involved in a tax scam, and had failed to report considerable income even after that. He owned a plane and a house . . . which he set on fire before he set off to change the world by attacking an IRS office that tries to make sure companies aren't screwing around with people's pensions.

Some hero.

But it was the government that had somehow persecuted him.

People drink the Kool Aid without even knowing who made it.