Over the past four years, there appears to be a “steady, upward
trend” in threats against IRS staffers, a TIGTA official told Dow Jones
Newswires last week. The most unnerving incident in recent memory
occurred just two weeks ago, when Joseph Stackflew his plane into IRS offices in Austin, Texas, killing one employee nearing retirement.Other notable attacks on the tax-collecting arm of the government in recent years include:
In March of 2009, Randy Nowak hired a hit man to kill an IRS worker
auditing his tax return and to burn down IRS offices in Lakeland, Fla.
He was sentenced to 30 years in jail.In 2008, Earnest Milton Barnett rammed his Jeep Cherokee into the
IRS’s Birmingham, Ala., offices and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
You know, I pay my taxes, not grudgingly, but not all that happily either. I mean, does anybody like giving money up? But at the end of the day, I like roads and schools and cops, and while I’m not hugely a fan of paying the stupid politicians I do recognize you have to pay them all if you’re gonna pay some of ’em. Still, the annual reminder of how much money I pay out burns.
But in my wildest resentful nightmares I would never imagine that it’s some clerk, some typist, some middle manager, some auditor, event, at the local IRS office would be to blame for my plight, and would go on the attack against a place where those people work. You know, this is what the “leaders” of the teabagger resentment fest don’t get. To them, stirring up tax rage is a completely abstract thing they’re doing. To the people listening to them, though, it’s disturbingly concrete.
A.