THE FIRES in Austin were still burning yesterday when the Internet lit up with government haters cheering suicide pilot Joe Stack and calling him a hero. "Finally an American man took a stand against our tyrannical government that no longer follows the Constitution," wrote Emily Walters of Louisville, Ky.
Walters was one of at least two dozen people who founded Facebook fan groups to hail the homicidal pilot.
Most had only a tiny handful of members, but hers attracted more than 200 before Facebook removed it.
"His sacrifice was for all of us," wrote Texan Tyler Britten.
Crackpots were also praising the dead pilot on Twitter.
"Joe Stack, you are a true American Hero and we need more of you to make a stand," tweeted Greg Lenihan, an engineer in San Diego.
Stack's manifesto railed against Wall Street, the Catholic Church, the IRS and the failure to reform health care - a little something for everyone.
The right called him a socialist, and the left branded him a right-wing tea partyer.
The only pol Stack name-checked in his final rant was "recent presidential puppet" George W. Bush, though he called all politicians useless.
There are always members of a small lunatic fringe ready to embrace a domestic terrorist targeting the feds. Tim McVeigh, who blew up the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, killing 168 people, many of them children, remains a hero in some disgruntled circles 10 years after his execution.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Austin) said it was outrageous that some Americans were praising Stack.
This was a cowardly act of domestic terrorism," he said, and Stack's rant "reflects the steadily increasing flow of 'the government is out to get me' paranoia."
On the other end of the crazy scale, Internet conspiracy theorists - including Austin radio host Alex Jones - were quick yesterday to declare that the plane crash was staged by the government "to demonize the tea party movement."
One founder of a Stack fan club on Facebook, Rick Wagner, is a pilot in Minnesota. His "about me" quote, which one hopes is a joke, reads:
"When I go I want to be able to look back and tell all the passengers to quit screaming."
