The "Tea Party" tax day protests which took place yesterday apparently got mixed reviews from all concerned. They did get a lot of media coverage, most of which at least tried to be respectful of their views. That's more than most protests get from the media, but this was largely due to the fact that Fox News was a de facto sponsor of the events. They reportedly broadcast live from several locations throughout the day. One of these was in Sacramento, where a Fox News personality attended the rally. Right down the road, Fresno, California also had a big turnout for their tea party. The rural areas which surround these cities are fairly conservative, even though they are in the heart of California, so it's not too surprising that they both got a good turnout.

But what wasn't mentioned, at least not in any news that I've seen, was that Fresno has an ugly history of violent terrorist actions against the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS has a processing facility here, where millions of Westerners send their tax forms each year.

On April 1, 1991, it was attacked by mortars. You read that right -- mortars. A group calling itself "Up The IRS, Inc." later claimed responsibility. The authorities took this claim seriously, since they had already claimed responsibility for a car bomb the previous February at the Los Angeles IRS office.

The news reports showed that the cops were keeping their information pretty closely held. The weapons used in Fresno were described as "pipe bombs" which had been "launched," and although there was speculation as to whether the launchers were on some sort of remote control and whether the launchers were homemade or professional, no further facts were forthcoming.

Ten bombs were launched at the IRS facility, right at lunchtime when the parked lot would have been flooded with people (the facility employs thousands of people). Several of the bombs exploded, damaging some cars, but thankfully nobody was hurt.

From an Associated Press story from April, 1991:

"We just wanted to let you know we, Up the IRS, Inc., bombed the IRS facility on April 1, 1991. You can verify this with the FBI."

FBI agent George Vinson said the letter apparently is authentic, but he refused to go into detail about how investigators knew.

. . .

Up the IRS Inc. identified itself in the latest letter as "a group of people who have been deprived of our Constitutional rights by the IRS." The letter complained of taxes being stolen from workers and "sucked up by all your welfare addicts." It threatened another action, saying "it is just a question of when, what and where."

. . .

[Earlier] Up the IRS Inc. took responsibility in a letter to the Santa Monica Outlook after a pickup truck loaded with drums of explosives caught fire near an IRS office in Southern California on Feb. 23, 1990. The fire burned itself out before the explosives were ignited.

Both these attacks happened years before the Oklahoma City federal building was bombed, and few remember them now. But now seemed to be the time to remind people about these acts of domestic terrorism -- an attempted car bombing and a mortar attack -- which had a very specific target: the Internal Revenue Service. I found no mention that anyone responsible for these attacks was ever arrested or brought to justice.

The Department of Homeland Security recently made the news for warning of the possibility of right-wing domestic terrorism in the United States. Conservatives started howling, as could have been predicted.

But, in my mind, home-grown violent extremists shouldn't really be labeled on a "left/right" axis. They should be labeled on more of a "harmless crank/dangerously violent madman" scale. Because the idea of taking out an IRS office doesn't really seem to me to be part of any sort of overarching political philosophy. It could occur to any dangerously unbalanced individual, on either side of the political spectrum.

Which is why neither the left or the right is totally right in summing up the week. The right is getting huffy about DHS keeping tabs on dangerous right-wing groups, in case they should show terrorist impulses. The left is smirking at them, and in essence saying "you've always supported such tactics before, for keeping tabs on lefty groups, so what's your problem?" The left is also doing its best to portray all the tax protestors as deranged individuals -- cranks and whack jobs, in other words.

Neither side is truly right. Right-wing groups or movements can indeed get out of control, or spur lone individuals to murderous acts on innocent people (which is one definition of "terrorism"). Timothy McVeigh taught us all that. The danger does indeed exist.

The left, however, should decry the same unconstitutional methods used against righty groups that they have complained about for years when used to spy on lefty groups -- it's only intellectually honest to do so. And the left should also admit that while they may ridicule the message and the slogans used by the Tea Party groups, that everyone has a right to use peaceful protest and street theater -- Tea Party groups as well as anti-war groups. The protests that I heard about were fairly well organized, polite, and it was even reported about a few of them that they "picked up their trash" when they left. The protest in Lafayette Park (across the street from the White House) was broken up a half an hour early (because someone went too far by tossing a box of tea bags over the fence of the White House grounds -- a BIG no-no as far as the Secret Service is concerned), and they didn't riot or fight the cops, they just left early.

So I am in no way equating what happened yesterday with what happened back in the early 1990s. But I do wish that someone in the media would remember that the IRS has been previously attacked -- using the same tactics that McVeigh used, as well as a mortar attack seemingly designed to kill IRS employees.

I don't enjoy filling out my taxes any more than the next guy or gal. It's a pain. And I'm not always happy about what my taxes are being used for, either. But I encourage everyone -- left, right, and center -- to keep their perspective about the situation. I don't hate IRS workers, they're just doing a job like anyone else. I strongly condemn anyone who would advocate violence against any of them. I would hope that is something everyone -- from Tea Party folks to the folks ridiculing them -- could agree upon.

[Note: I apologize for the lack of links. I could only find news stories from this long ago using Lexis/Nexis, which is a subscription service. If anyone can find any links to contemporary news accounts, feel free to post them.]

[Update: Here is a link from the New York Times which has a publicly available article on the story. The article goes into detail about the attack, but was obviously written before the letter claiming credit had arrived, as it does not mention it.]

-- Chris Weigant