BrianGarst.com

Frank Rich writes a lot of nonsense.  His latest column can only be described as deranged, as he flails about trying to tar the entire conservative and tea party movements as unhinged.  In order to do so, he must play fast and loose with the facts.  One such lie involves the man who flew a plan into an IRS building:

Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.” But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner.

He’s not a card-carrying member, but there are disturbing “overlaps.” You see how he does that?  Very sneaky.

Yet the picture he paints of Stack as a right-wing nut is entirely dishonest, though he is not the first to try do so.

Left out of Rich’s characterization of Stack are the many aspects of his manifesto which overlap mainstream leftwing thought, including that of Frank Rich.  He attacks drug and insurance companies.  He complains about corporate profits.  He swipes at organized religion.  He calls George W. Bush a “puppet.”  And then he finally ends by mocking capitalism.

But Frank Rich sees overlaps with the Tea Party.

The truth is that Joseph Stack will not fit into any tidy ideological box.  His rant runs the ideological spectrum, making it easy to find a sentence here or there to hang around the neck of whomever one seeks to target for guilt by association of thought.   The only real theme that unifies it all is that he saw our government as broken.  It seems most Americans, from left and right, are guilty of agreeing.

Frank Rich Joseph Stack Tea Parties