The smoke had not yet cleared from around the Austin office building where Andrew Joseph Stack III crashed his single-engine airplane Thursday when the usual suspects began to distance themselves from the suicidal malcontent and point fingers at another man behind the curtain.

Tea party rhetoricians ignored the anti-government rantings in the rambling “manifesto” Stack had posted on the Internet and labeled him a left-wing crazy. Liberals ignored the fact that Stack quoted — favorably, it appeared — an old communist shibboleth (“From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.”) and labeled him a right-wing crazy.

There will no doubt be more excavating into Joe Stack’s troubled past in order to determine just where he stood along the political spectrum. Someone might even find an answer someday, but we will bet right now that it won’t settle the argument. Each side desperately needs him as a villain, and mere facts won’t make them give up.

This is nothing new. Ideologues often find it necessary to distance themselves from their more unsavory allies. “Hitler was a socialist,” the extreme right screams, their main argument being the Nazi Party’s “National Socialist” ballot designation. They conveniently forget that Hitler slaughtered socialists and communists in Germany almost as enthusiastically as he killed Jews.

“Stalin created a cruel perversion of socialism,” screams the modern-day left, conveniently ignoring the fact that for years, prominent members of the American left were blind apologists for the homicidal dictator.

It is all about creating a vacuum around an indefensible character, removing any evidence that might tie him to the ideology being defended.

Joseph Stack is now the man in the bell jar, and the vacuum pumps are being manned by both those on the left and those on the right.

In truth, both factions have reason to row as fast as they can away from Joe Stack, though the right probably will have a harder job. Much of Stack’s “manifesto” could have been lifted from the tea party handbook: the hatred of the federal government; the paranoid delusion that his own business reversals were everyone else’s fault but his own; his final determination that “violence is not only the answer, it is the only answer.”

But those old enough to have lived through the turbulent ’60s will find something of the Weathermen and the SDS in Stack’s raging against the machine of corporate greed and power.

Some few — those willing to read his rambling statement with an open mind — will even find some things in it with which to agree. Stack’s first major financial setback, the one from which all his other real or imagined grievances stemmed, came at the hands of a 1986 tax-reform law that blatantly discriminated against independent computer consultants, making it almost impossible for them to work except as employees of big companies. The law was enacted at the behest of IBM, which reaped a huge tax break because of it. Hardly anybody could blame Stack for being bitter about that.

But thousands of other embittered computer consultants sucked up their anger and went on with their lives without flying airplanes into Internal Revenue Service office buildings. Joe Stack went from that failure to another, and another, and another. Most of them were of his own making, but he would never admit it.

There is a lot of Joe Stack-type anger in the land these days, a lot of angry, dissatisfied people blaming their troubles on some ill-understood “other.” They are trying to step away from Joe Stack, trying to create a vacuum around him, but they are going to have a hard time doing it.