Tea Party Terrorism

[Jeffersons Ghost]

Joseph Stack had barely finished flying his airplane into a Texas IRS office building when the battle over his legacy began.

Bloggers on the left ask why people — especially people on the right — are not calling him a terrorist. If this had been done by a brownish-looking Muslim guy whose suicide note paralleled Islamist political themes, then right wingers would be demanding that anyone who refused to label the attack ‘terrorism’ be put up on treason charges.”

Bloggers on the right, such as Conn Carroll, asked why people — especially people on the left — were acting as if Stack was a conservative Tea Party nut when the anti-tax animus that led him to point his plane at I.R.S. offices was only one part of an eclectic ideology.

These are arguments worth having, for two reasons.

First, the label “terrorist” shapes our immediate response to attacks and our long-term policies. We’ve invaded countries and altered domestic surveillance laws as part of a “war on terror,” whereas we wouldn’t do such things as part of a “war on a nut who flew his plane into a building and is dead now.”

Second, given the apparent momentum of the Tea Party movement, it would be nice to know if Stack’s kamikaze mission was a not-all-that-shocking emanation from it — whether, as some claim, more than a few Tea Partiers are crazy.