Pardon the rant, but as I’m sure you know, today is tax day.

Don’t look for me to bitch and moan.  In fact, Molly and I owed money this year.  And we paid it.  On time.  Because that’s part of being a good citizen — paying for the services our government renders.  So you won’t find me at any tea party rally today — or any day, for that matter.

I wonder. Do tea partiers ever send letters? Use the phone? Access the intertubes? Get vaccinated?  Go to National Parks?  Drive on interstate highways?  Who in God’s name do they think is responsible for them? It’s as if they live in a hermetically sealed little world in which government never enters their lives — except when they collect their social security checks and use medicare.

I am sick and tired of these folks pissing on the federal government.  I ask you: when did government service become unpatriotic?

When I was at the State Department, I had the honor to work with some exceptional people, many of whom had traveled to dangerous locales around the world and risked their life in service to this nation.  As E.J. Dionne noted today, that’s also true of many others in many lines of government service.

You might imagine that if a terrorist attack killed an American public servant and threatened the lives of 200 people, it would have been big news for weeks and an enduring symbol of the risks taken by those who serve their country.

Yet when an American named Joseph Stack flew a plane into an office building in Austin in February, killing Vernon Hunter, a 68-year-old Vietnam veteran, the news reports were remarkably muted, and the story quickly disappeared.

Hunter worked for the Internal Revenue Service, which was housed in the Austin building, and according to Stack’s suicide note, the IRS was his target.

On or about April 15, the Web and the commentary pages overflow with assaults on the IRS that cast its employees as jackbooted thugs, to use an old phrase, and our tax system as a form of oppression comparable to the exertions of the worst Russian czars and the most fiendish modern totalitarian dictators.

We should call this propaganda what it is: a sweeping falsehood that libels the work of committed federal employees such as Hunter.

I’d take it a step further.  Have we forgotten the lessons of Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City?  Have we forgotten that 168 people, including children, for God’s sake, lost their lives that day?  Monday is the fifteenth anniversary of that terrible, terrible day.

Have we forgotten about the foreign service officers killed in the Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania?  Have we forgotten about the soldiers killed by the attack on the U.S.S. Cole?  The post office workers killed in the anthrax attacks?  The FBI, DEA, ATF, Border Patrol, and other agents killed in the line of duty?  Are they socialists?  Or fascists?  Are all those lives meaningless because you have to pay a few more cents on the dollar in taxes?

Tea party patriots my ass.  Their selfish rants dishonor all those who have died in service to this country.

Flag photo: Jcolman via Flickr using CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license

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