In the wake of yesterday’s tragedy in Austin, it’s certainly worthwhile to ask what caused troubled software engineer Joe Stack to crash a plane into an office building that housed 200 Internal Revenue Service employees. But will the media get the story right? Perhaps, just perhaps, I’ll be blessedly wrong about this, but I don’t think so.

Texas Plane Crash

We know how these stories seem to go. The “unbiased” journalists from the old media working in the field first develop the story, establish the “factual record” and – once that job is done – the would-be opinion makers move on, using that “factual” docket to make their pious cases. The narrative has begun, as this AP story demonstrates. Joe Stack hated the IRS, felt that this oft-criticized agency had done him wrong and – the conclusion is easy to see – was therefore another right-wing nut job who went over the edge. He was a victim, if you will, of the hatred and fury that festers within the conservative and libertarian movements. His friends, the AP tells us, never saw it coming:

They never heard Stack talk about politics, about taxes, about the government — the sources of pain that Stack claims drove him to his death.

But, nowhere in this story does the AP drill down any further. If you read Stack’s 3,000+ word on-line suicide note, it’s clear that he didn’t hate the IRS because he despised big-government per se. He hated the IRS because he believed that the agency was in collusion with the ultimate enemy: big business. A few telling examples from Stack’s manifesto:

…the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies… Now when the wealthy f**k up, the poor get to die for the mistakes… isn’t that a clever, tidy solution… The recent presidential puppet GW Bush and his cronies in their eight years certainly reinforced for all of us that this criticism rings equally true for all of the government. Nothing changes unless there is a body count (unless it is in the interest of the wealthy sows at the government trough). In a government full of hypocrites from top to bottom, life is as cheap as their lies and their self-serving laws.

And, perhaps most telling of all, consider the final two lines of Stack’s post:

The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.

Conservatives and libertarians frequently, and justifiably, complain that the left distorts our positions and views by cherry-picking the most extreme elements within our movement and using the broadest of brushes to purport that such elements represent everyone even remotely connected with our views. It would be a mistake to do the same thing here in reverse. Joe Stack was clearly a deranged, paranoid extremist, but we should not suppose that he represents liberals, or even liberal rage, as a whole. Joe Stack was over the edge and, as such, his actions represent nothing more than a particular form of paranoid rage.

But as the pundits fire up their keyboards, let’s hope they get at least this right: Joe Stack’s anger was not fueled by the right, it was rather clearly rooted in leftist ideology. To a troubled man and those whose lives he snatched from this earthly realm before their time: rest in peace. To the angry leftists who poured gasoline on this particular fire: please take a look in the mirror before you start pointing fingers.