Thursday, February 18, 2010

Texan Crashes Plane Into IRS Building

From Huffpo:

A software engineer furious with the Internal Revenue Service launched a suicide attack on the agency Thursday by crashing his small plane into an office building containing nearly 200 IRS employees, setting off a raging fire that sent workers fleeing for their lives.

At least one person in the building was missing.

A federal law official identified the pilot as Joseph Stack and said investigators were looking at a long anti-government screed and farewell note that he apparently posted on the Web earlier in the day as an explanation for what he was about to do.

In it, the author cited run-ins with the IRS and ranted about the tax agency, government bailouts and corporate America's "thugs and plunderers."

"I have had all I can stand," he wrote in the note, dated Thursday, adding: "I choose not to keep looking over my shoulder at `big brother' while he strips my carcass."

Stack, 53, also apparently set fire to his house about six miles from the crash site before embarking on the suicide flight, said two law enforcement officials, who like other authorities spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was still going on.

HuffPo goes on to note that he left a bomb at the local airport, set his house on fire, and has hospitalized two people in the attack; one is unaccounted for.

The also have republished his suicide note; it is a living, breathing example of the seething anger that's growing in America over the difference in treatment between the ultra-wealthy and everybody else. I had thought, upon first learning of the note, that it would be a left-wing or right-wing harangue. It isn't. There is no ideology anymore in saying, as Stack did, that "there are two 'interpretations' for every law; one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us... Oh, and the monsters are the very ones making and enforcing the laws; the inquisition is still alive and well today in this country."

No, it is the same anger that animates both the teabaggers' rage and the left's disgust with the current Administration and Congress. I can only hope that more don't reach the same conclusion. But I doubt it, and I am gravely, gravely concerned that this is not going to be the outlier incident that I hope it is.

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