‘Random Tragedy’ Not So Random: Socialist Serial Killer Amy Bishop

Posted on 25 Comments

“It’s always baffling to me when people try to politicize random tragedies — usually while they’re breaking news stories with little real information.”
— James Joyner, Outside the Beltway

Joyner is (a) from Alabama and (b) has a Ph.D., and I’m sorry if that caused anyone’s head to explode — “An intellectual? From Alabama?” — but he doesn’t seem to be the kill-everybody-in-the-faculty-meeting type of intellectual, so he’s OK with me.

Joyner is correct about the unfortunate tendency toward instant politicization of major news events. We’ve seen Michael Moore blame the 1999 Columbine shootings on Charlton Heston. We’ve seen Robert Kennedy Jr. blame the 2005 New Orleans flood on Haley Barbour and George W. Bush.

Having recently seen liberal bloggers make fools of themselves by hasty conclusions — “Send the Body to Glenn Beck!” — I certainly wasn’t going theorize about Professor Amy Bishop’s murder spree at the University of Alabama-Huntsville in the absence of facts.

Well, the facts are now starting to pile up like the corpses of Amy Bishop’s victims, so let’s go there, shall we?

  • Bishop was an alumna of Harvard University, which is also the alma mater of Ted Kaczynski.
  • As Instapundit noted last night, at least one of her students described Bishop as a “socialist.”
  • The UAH massacre wasn’t Bishop’s first homicide: “The Boston Globe reported at the time that Amy Bishop had accidentally shot her 18-year-old brother, Seth M. Bishop, an accomplished violinist who had won a number of science awards, in Braintree. Braintree Police Chief Paul Frazier confirmed today at a news conference that Amy Bishop had shot her brother in 1986. But Frazier offered a different account of the shooting, saying Bishop had shot her brother during an argument and was being booked by police when the chief at the time ordered the booking process stopped and Bishop released to her mother.”
  • Via Dan Riehl and Gateway Pundit, there’s now this news: “Braintree officers who remember the 1986 shooting said that former police Chief John Polio dismissed detectives from the case and ordered the department to release Amy Bishop after a telephone conversation with former district attorney William Delahunt. Delahunt is currently a U.S. congressman from Massachusetts.”
  • Moe Lane is just askin’ questions: “Polio was not forthcoming about why then-DA Delahunt decided not to press charges, or why the documents in the case are apparently not available. Given the circumstances, perhaps the Congressman from MA-10 would like to fill in the blanks, as it were?”

You know who else might want to start asking questions? Republican Joe Malone, who is reportedly considering a challenge to Delahunt in MA-10:

In [the Jan. 19] special election Scott Brown won the 10th Congressional district 59.8% – 39.3% over Martha Coakley . . .
Worth noting is that Brown’s senior team, before they were Romney’s senior team, were Malone’s senior team. Eric Fehrnstrom, Beth Lindstrom, and Priscilla Ruzzo were instrumental in Malone’s runs for Treasurer. The Brown machine is revved up and Joe Malone may reclaim them for his next run.

Polls show Delahunt is in trouble, he’s reported to be considering retirement, and the news that Delahunt was responsible for releasing a Harvard-educated socialist serial killer . . . well, that’s not so good for Bill Delahunt, is it?

The Other McCain: Politicization You Can Believe In!

UPDATE: Professor William Jacobson:

One thing about Bishop’s politics seems likely, however. And that is that she must never have attended a Tea Party or said something nice about Sarah Palin, or we would have heard about it by now.

The BlogProf coins a new term, “Going Professorial.”

25 comments

  1. It is amazing how these stories are unwinding. I find the ties to MA sort of ironic considering our election situation right now.

  2. It is amazing how these stories are unwinding. I find the ties to MA sort of ironic considering our election situation right now.

  12. […] Stacy McCain has rounded up some commentary from police officers who remember the case, which suggests there was some kind of coverup. Braintree officers who remember the 1986 shooting said that former police Chief John Polio dismissed detectives from the case and ordered the department to release Amy Bishop after a telephone conversation with former district attorney William Delahunt, who is currently a U.S. congressman from Massachusetts.”The police officers here were very upset about that,” said Frazier, who was a patrolman at the time and spoke to officers who remembered the incident that day, including one who filed a report on it. […]

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