tea party hero?

Gather | In my coffee shop conversations and errands around East Texas (haven of right wing lunatics and constitutional crackpots) the last two days, one thing is becoming obvious; the right wing has a new hero to put up there with Tim McVey and Terry Nichols. They are saying it in low voices, but none-the-less, they believe him to be a hero.

The first set at the coffee shop this morning started right up… “We been telling people things were fixin to change, and thank God for Joe Stack, people are going to take notice, and more will come soon now that he's had the balls to start it rolling!”, said Wayne. He is a locally notorious figure since the FBI and ATF raided his home and farm right after Waco. They didn’t find his doomsday stash and promptly left his place after tearing it apart and coming up empty handed. All it did was make him a local legend… and a legend in his own mind. He went on to describe how the IRS wasn’t a legal organization and was unconstitutional. The problem is, Wayne is dead broke and disabled and living on a government disability check. I asked him why he would be so against the government since he was so dependant on them, but he said he could live without the check if Texas left the Union or the government returned to what it was meant to be. He didnt remember teh talk teh day before about how he couldnt get by on his check and how his wife was suffering without healthcare access to a doctor.

Sonny chimed in, “ I knew this N***r president would cause this to come to a head! Now if just a few more brave souls would do something similar, things would start to come together!” Sonny is broke too and lives on a disability check, but he has land a cows and probably would not be so badoff if he stopped drinking.

Then Howard came in and said “How ‘bout that Joe Stack! …….A great American HERO!”. Now Howard aint broke by any means. He owns about 2 million dollars worth of land and runs about 500 head of prize cows, not to mention his large stock portfolio and a couple of companies he owns. He is the local Tea Party leader and organizer. It didn’t take long for him to start in with his typical and oft repeated complaints about all the income and property tax he pays. “By Gawd!” he groans “if more people had the guts Joe Stack did we could get somewhere! People would see how bad we have it! These lefties would have to give up!’

Well that stop at a coffee shop was all I could take so I drove over to the next community and sat down for another cup at the café. It didn’t get any better, a couple of locals known for belonging to a militia that “doesn’t exist anymore” started in with pretty much the same conversation and said they were hooking up with the Tea Party folks this weekend. They had considered it to be a rich guys game, but now it was making sense. But they added “we better get the right kind of folks to stop talking so loud about Stack, cause somebody is going to say we are for terrorism, and well, we are for it as long as its real Americans, protesting this commie government were getting.

As I ran my errands to the feed store, the barber shop, etc.. it was mostly all the same talk, but to be fair, most people said Stack should never have done that, because innocent people got hurt, but they were all glad he did what he did.