I’m sympathetic to the argument that domestic terrorist Joe Stack is an “ideological mutt” as Jonathan Capeheart put it the other day, but what’s interesting to me is that the right seems to have claimed him anyway.
Shortly after Stack flew his plane into an IRS building in Austin, killing Vietnam Veteran Vernon Hunter, Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown said “No one likes paying taxes obviously.” Iowa Rep. Steve King said “I think if we’d abolished the IRS back when I first advocated it, he wouldn’t have a target for his airplane.” Meanwhile, as Roy Edroso notes, the frenzied attempts of right-wing bloggers to distance themselves are so defensive as to have the opposite effect, as though they instinctively associated themselves with Stack’s anti-tax rhetoric. It’s not as though you saw a lot of liberals trying to defend themselves against the insistence that the Alabama shooter was somehow representative of liberalism.
At any rate, they needn’t have worried, since despite the fact that Stack proved himself to be a far more competent terrorist than Umar Abdulmutallab, there seems to be an emerging cultural consensus that white non-Muslims can’t be terrorists.
The only other thing I would add is that one of the most frustrating things is the linguistic distinction between an “act of terrorism” and a “crime.” Terrorism is a crime. Terrorists are a type of criminal.
— A. Serwer
