Consider David Koresh. By way of full disclosure, I should mention that I once had a casual acquaintanceship with David Jewell, who took his daughter Kiri out of the Branch Davidian compound about a year before the standoff. Jewell's ex-wife died in the aftermath of the siege. None of that changes the fact that CPAC straw-poll winner and Tea Party movement patriarch Ron Paul saw Koresh as some sort of misunderstood martyr to freedom of religion. In a post attributed to Paul from The Free Market, written in 1994, the Congressman from Texas makes it clear where his sympathies lay. In the essay, "The Moral Promise of Freedom," Paul writes:

Yet in its dealings with the Waco religious dissenters, the central government revealed that it has become intractably opposed to any individual or group that represents a challenge to its singular authority. To counter this challenge, the central government resorted to tactics that resulted in the death of 86 men, women, and children. As for the survivors, the government has put them on trial. This sort of brutality is inevitable in a system of absolute and centralized power. A government that invades private business by demanding confiscatory taxes, imposes unbearable regulations, and rules over business culture through pervasive labor controls, builds an appetite for even more power. As the power builds, so does the extent of corruption at the top and the disinformation that covers up the truth about its tyranny.

Hmm. Sounds not unlike a certain suicidal pilot with a grudge against the IRS to me. Forget the fact that Koresh was not, as Paul asserts, just an ordinary Texan with a few more guns than average. The full catalog of weapons can be found here, but highlights include grenades, assault submachine guns (no hunt is complete without them), and AK-47 assault rifles. Let's also not mention the fact that Kiri Jewell and other brave young women who got out of the compound before the siege testified to Koresh's repeated sexual abuse. Paul can cite a double-standard vis-a-vis the late Menachem Schneerson all he wants; while it is true that Rabbi Schneerson's particular sect of Judaism saw him as the Messiah, as far as I know they did not stockpile military grade weapons or keep a harem of barely pubescent girls.

Paul is far from the only one who wanted to make Koresh into some sort of hero. G. Gordon Liddy famously called the BATF "jackbooted thugs" and counseled his listeners to aim for the head if they were in a confrontation with agents.

These sentiments lit the fuse, metaphorically at least, for the bomb that destroyed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Tim McVeigh carried out his attack on the two-year anniversary of the tragic end of the Waco siege. And now we have the Tea Party. Joe Stack's manifesto/suicide note seems chock full of the sort of self-pitying impotent rage that is just about the only thing driving this national political temper tantrum masquerading as a political movement. Stack hoped his act would inspire others; how many more terrorist attempts, carried out by actors stoked into incoherent fury by elected representatives like Ron Paul or John Boehner, or voices like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, will we have to endure before enough people say: Enough!