APPLES AND ORANGES
(now updated)

The wingnuts are having a schadenfreude-gasm because Amy Bishop, a Massachusetts native and Harvard grad charged with killing three people at the University of Alabama after losing a tenure battle, was, in the words of the non-Murdoch but Murdochesque Boston Herald, "a far-left political extremist who was 'obsessed' with President Obama" (according to "a family source") and was described as a "socialist" by one commenter at ratemyprofessors.com.

This is especially delicious for wingnuts because Bishop also shot and killed her brother as a teenager, a shooting that was ruled an accident at the time, and was questioned in 1993 about the mailing of a pipe bomb to a professor with whom she had a dispute, although she was cleared.

Oh, the joy! "Socialism" killed and endangered all those people ... right?

Er, no. Let's say it's true that Bishop really did kill her brother out of malice, and that she sent that pipe bomb. Add that to the Huntsville murders.

Was any of this done out of a political motive?

Right-winger James von Brunn shot up the Holocaust Museum as a right-wing political act. Right-winger Scott Roeder murdered Dr. George Tiller as a right-wing political act. And it seems certain that right-winger Greg Girard was stockpiling weapons he could use for right-wing political acts -- resistance to the Obama administration's imaginary "secret police" -- that he envisioned.

I don't see politics (as opposed to office politics) as the motive for anything Amy Bishop is accused of. She may be a sociopathic nut, but her sociopathy is apolitical. Unless that changes, it's apples and oranges.

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UPDATE: Donald Douglas of American Power, one of the wingnuts I quote above, says about lefties' responses to this case:

They keep looking for "motive" (here)....

That link is a link to this post -- in other words, according to Mr. Douglas, what I write above is a search for motive.

I keep looking for evidence that Donald Douglas can read. I say above that wingnuts like him are looking for links between Bishop's politics and the killings, in order to score political points. That seems glaringly obvious. Is there anything I say above that offers positive speculation regarding motive? All I do is discount any connection between Bishop's politics and the crimes. That's because all the evidence suggests that politics wasn't her motive.

Douglas, of course, is engaging in a massive amount of projection, because he thinks every terrible moment in Bishop's history is the result of a vast conspiracy, on the part of Bishop and others, to kill and cover up killings and explain away killings, all of it motivated by evil Satanic leftism:

Not only is Amy Bishop a leftist who killed her brother and got a pass from the politically correct criminal justice system (especially Democratic Congressman and then-Massachusetts DA Bill Delahunt), she's also a suspected pipe bomber who is now accused of premeditated murder of three faculty colleagues who were presiding over her tenure case. But add on top of this the fact that the premeditation included the planned killings of three non-white colleages and this really should be explosive for the radical multiculturalists.... perish the thought that Bishop's motive could have been racism? Maybe Harvard-trained left-wing professors get a pass on that.

In wingnut Cloud-Cuckooland, of course, all lefties are racist and all racists are lefties.

You know what? I have no freaking idea whether there was a racial motive in these killings. I know that, when you dig into the past, the intended pipe-bomb victim was white, and Bishop's brother was white. Maybe David Dwayne Dilbert D'Artagnan Donald Douglas has an explanation for how those crimes, if she's guilty of them, fits his new theory of racism. Maybe back then she was trying to eliminate the white race, one whitey every few years, as a revolutionary act. I sure hope he tells us. He has such insight into the criminal mind -- I'm dying to know.