DADWAGON

We each, in our own way, seek to love and honor our fathers, even if that sometimes means killing them after finding them “in the clinch” with our wives.

So it shouldn’t be so shocking that Samantha Bell would call her father — the sadsack IRS killer-pilot Joe Stack — a “hero.” She told Good Morning America that he, at least, took action:

I think too many people lay around and wait for things to happen. But if nobody comes out and speaks up on behalf of injustice, then nothing will ever be accomplished.

Indeed, Samantha. Your father took action against the great menace facing our free society. He alone was willing to stand up to the tyranny of Vernon Hunter, 67-year-old office worker.

Okay, so it’s not like politicians have encouraged this kind of action. Steve King (R-Iowa) was only calling for the IRS to be imploded, not exploded. See the nuance there?

Will Bunch at the Huffington Post, sensing blood in the Internets, has a ready answer to this “hero” nonsense: lift Hunter up as the “real American hero.”

They were picking up on the theme started by Hunter’s son Ken, who told ABC his dad was a hero. That is Ken’s right. His dad — a two-tour Vietnam vet and by all accounts a loving father — seems like he was a solid guy. But the HuffPo is being a little opportunistic here. Hunter was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Making a martyr out of him won’t strengthen the tenuous case that Sarah Palin was secretly behind the attack (seems to me that Stack was studiously nonpartisan: anti-capitalist and anti-IRS).

Let Hunter’s son remember him as a hero. A good father should be a hero to his son. The punditry, though, should leave him be. Let him be just another good person who got killed in the U.S. — one of more than 16,000 a year — and didn’t deserve it.

As for Stack’s daughter: Holy Christ, woman! Shut your mouth already.