Joan Walsh at Salon.com: Why So Little Attention To Vernon Hunter?

[Hissyspit]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/walsh/politics/2010/02/22/vernon_hunter/index.html?source=newsletter

Why so little attention to Vernon Hunter?

IRS bomber Joe Stack captured the news for days, but his African American, Vietnam vet victim has gone unheralded

BY JOAN WALSH



KTVT-TV
Vernon Hunter

I traveled this weekend and missed the identification of the only person killed by Joe Stack in his unsettling attack on the Internal Revenue Service office in Austin last week (h/t Crooks and Liars, Will Bunch). He is Vietnam veteran and IRS worker Vernon Hunter.

His son, Ken Hunter, told local reporters he was tired of the media paying too much attention to the fractured and incoherent political beliefs espoused by the demented Stack, and not enough attention to his father's life:

"There was just too much going on about what the guy did and what he believed in, and enough's enough. They don't need to talk about him. Talk about my dad. You know, some people are trying to make this guy out to be a hero, a patriot. My dad served two terms in Vietnam. This guy never served at all. My dad wasn't responsible for his tax problems."

Hunter said his father was the kind of guy who'd have tried to help Stack with the tax troubles that supposedly drove Stack to the violence that took Hunter's life.

Googling "Vernon Hunter" on Monday night I was stunned by how little the national media, beyond Bunch, Crooks and Liars, the Associated Press and ABC's Good Morning America, had paid attention to Stack's victim. GMA seemed to write about Hunter because the show featured Stack's daughter from his first marriage, Samantha Bell, calling her father a "hero." To her credit, Bell retracted her statement, and labeled Hunter the hero, when she learned about the man her father killed.

Stack's daughter may be forgiven bad judgment in the wake of losing her father. American politicians can't. I cut new Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown some slack the other night – Brown compared Stack to the "frustrated" voters who backed him last month, "who want their elected officials to be accountable and open and talk about the things that are affecting their daily lives." But I haven't seen Brown retract or clarify his comments since Hunter's identity was discovered, and that's disappointing.

- snip -

Human Events editor Jed Babbin should win the bottom-feeder award for joking about Hunter's killing at that confab of crazy, CPAC. Talking about his friend Grover Norquist, Babbin quipped:

"I'm really happy to see Grover today. He was getting a little testy in the past couple of weeks. And I was just really, really glad that it was not him identified as flying that airplane into the IRS building."

I'm sure the Hunter family enjoyed the humor.

The Christian Science Monitor reported that posters at the racist site Stormfront.org are Stack fans, with one proclaiming "The Guy is a true Hero!" Since we don't yet know the nature of Stack's anti-government beliefs, I won't file him with the anti-government, anti-Democrat and anti-Obama armed lunatic fringe that's emerged since we elected our first black president. Yet. But it is certainly worth noting that Stack just happened to kill a black man; and the right-wing racist anti-Obama Birther who struck the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. also killed a black man, Stephen Tyrone Johns.

MORE

[hfojvt]

1. Klebold, Harris, McVeigh, Dahmer, Jesse James

Quick, try to name somebody that those people killed. Our country always seems to remember and thus honor the murderers while ignoring and forgetting the victims. Asimov suggested in one of the Foundation books that such people should be referred to by insults and numbers instead of names loser#6, coward#17. I have read of more than one moronic young thug who started a crime spree with the idea and boast that "I am gonna be famous".

so yeah, knr and :patriot: :patriot: :patriot: salutes to the Hunter family.

[hfojvt]

2. ouch,. lots of recs but not enough kicks

[Blue_Tires]

6. Whitman, the unabomber, the list goes on...

[hfojvt]

7. so many that many have been forgotten

They sorta only get 15 minutes of fame. They get talked about for a couple of weeks and then are mostly forgotten. Virginia Tech is remembered, Cho is mostly forgotten.

[malaise]

3. Excellent question

but Joan knows the answer

[spanone]

4. it's an insult to mr hunter who was a true american hero

[City Lights]

5. Our corporate media is part of the problem.

I despise them. :nuke:

RIP, Mr. Hunter. :patriot:

Peace to your loved ones.