Politics Don't Kill People. People Do.

Investigators say Joseph Stack set fire to his own home before getting in a plane and flying it into the IRS building in Austin. Vernon Hunter, a 67-year old Revenue Office Manager, was killed for being in his office, doing his job. What more do we need to say? Plenty it seems... and most of it dumb.

When Joseph Stack finished off his online manifesto/suicide note and headed off to Kamikaze the IRS yesterday, he was not behaving rationally. Well, duh, you might say. Pretty darned obvious the guy was a nutjob behaving like a nutjob.

But not so for the reality squeezers at either end of the political spectrum. Their first thought in the aftermath of any tragedy is "how do we blame the other side for this?" For them, reality isn't nuanced or complex. For them, people aren't nuanced or complex either - everything's just black and white, yes or no, one or zero like we run on some kind of partisan binary code.

It doesn't matter whether it's RedState or Kos. They're both doing it and they both suck for it. For Redstate to call Stack "a Left-wing extremist" is plain f*cking ridiculous. But for Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart to say Stack was ideological kin with "the extreme elements of the Tea Party movement" is just as dumb and simplistic.

Turning tragedy into petty point scoring is pathetic. It betrays a profoundly simplistic, cartoon view on the world and a big lack of humanity. Grow up, right- and left-wing nuts. The guy in the picture died. Neither Glenn Beck or Noam Chomsky killed him - a freakin' nutjob in a plane did.

Although ideologues prefer to think he was on one team or the other, Stack's online screeds show he was both 'liberal' on some issues and 'conservative' on others. He was 'liberal' in that he expressed contempt for corporatism and sympathy for its victims. But he was 'conservative' in that he hated big government and it's "socialistic interferences" in the lives of citizens. In other words, Stack was a typical American.

The only difference between him and pretty much everyone else is that his anger pushed him into insanity. Not right wing, not left wing. He was if anything, a middle-of-the-road extremist.