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Home Front: Politix
Far-LEFT extremists with guns
2010-02-16
‘Oddball' portrait of Amy Bishop emerges

As authorities searched for clues into what could have sent a University of Alabama neurobiology professor on an alleged killing spree, friends and family yesterday described Braintree native Amy Bishop as an awkward introvert on the brink of losing her teaching job.

Bishop's husband, James Anderson, told the Herald his wife had been fighting the university for over a year about a tenure denial, and several months ago received a final decision. She was upset, but not overly emotional, approaching her appeal “like a game of chess,' he said.

Police in Huntsville, Ala., charged Bishop, 44, with capital murder after she allegedly opened fire on six colleagues at a faculty meeting Friday, killing three. Afterward, she calmly called her husband and asked him to pick her up as if nothing had happened, said police Chief Henry Reyes.

“She was an oddball - just not very sociable,' said Sylvia Fluckiger, a former lab technician who worked with Bishop in 1993.

Bishop acknowledged at the time being questioned in the bombing attempt of a Harvard medical doctor evaluating her on doctorate work, a professor with whom Bishop was known to quarrel, Fluckiger said.

Reyes confirmed he is working with the FBI to learn more about why Bishop was a suspect in the attempted bombing of Dr. Paul Rosenberg, who received a double-pipe bomb in the mail on Dec. 19, 1993. He ran from his Newton home with his wife, escaping without injury. The bomb never exploded.

“She was quite cavalier about it,' Fluckiger said of Bishop's description of her interview with police. She said Bishop “grinned' as she described being asked by cops whether she'd ever taken stamps off an envelope and fastened them onto something else. “I cannot tell you what the grin meant,' Fluckiger said.

Seven years prior, Bishop shot her brother to death in Braintree in an incident that was ruled an accident at the time.

But Braintree police Chief Paul Frazier has raised questions about the handling of the case, and officials are investigating missing records in the 1986 death of 18-year-old Seth Bishop.

A classmate of Seth Bishop's recalled yesterday that the boy, who was “painfully shy,' never talked about his older, only sibling.

“It was as if he was a complete stranger in her life. It seemed like a dysfunctional family. We just accepted them as being odd,' said the classmate, who spoke to the Herald on condition of anonymity.

Amy Bishop, he said, “wasn't mean because she wasn't someone you could get close to. She wasn't an attractive girl, she didn't have friends. She didn't work at having friends. I think people probably, over time, learned to leave her alone.'

The Bishop household, he said, “was anything but a home . . . It was just a really dreary, dark place where there wasn't a lot of love.'

Meanwhile, in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Anderson said he was searching for the “trigger' to his wife's breakdown, and that he wondered whether an e-mail message - potentially in the form of a final tenure denial - might have upset her, because university higher-ups were known to send “nastygrams' on Fridays.

A family source said Bishop, a mother of four children - the youngest a third-grade boy - was a far-left political extremist who was “obsessed' with President Obama to the point of being off-putting.

But Mercedes Paz, a Brookline biochemist who also oversaw Bishop's work in 1993, described her as a friend and a likable woman.

“She was a very good person,' said Paz, 81. “She was respectful and she did what she was supposed to do. I never saw anything that could make me think she was violent.'

The header on Drudge was: "REPORT: Alabama shooter is 'far-left political extremist who was 'obsessed' with President Obama'... "...not sure where the 'report' is, but this shooter genuinely does not fit the mold of a 'right-winger'. So...

Question for Janet Napalitano (who is likely having this blog scanned for 'chatter'): Are you now prepared to amend your idiotic document titled 'Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment'?
Are you so idiotic to dismiss that extremists & frustrated radicals on YOUR side of the aisle might be as dangerous as those you portray in that very, very biased report? Sadly, it will likely take a much more tragic occurance for these leftist politicians to acknowledge their 'profiling' of political enemies blinds them to the reality of radicalism, extremism and, lest we not forget, simple 'emotional instability'. BITE ME, Janet.
Posted by:logi_cal

#3  She shot her brother three times with a shotgun and it was judged to be an accident. WTF? This goofball had a bag of mental problems.
Posted by: JohnQC   2010-02-16 18:43  

#2  you can be sure the WaPo, NYTimes, etc. will do everything possible to avoid reporting it

NYT: "All the news that fits our narrative"
Posted by: DMFD   2010-02-16 16:32  

#1  not even FoxNews has pointed out the 'far left' aspect of this yet (as far as I know) and you can be sure the WaPo, NYTimes, etc. will do everything possible to avoid reporting it

this would be a good idea except that if Dr B had been a Tea Party fan, it would lead the news for a week
Posted by: lord garth   2010-02-16 13:59  

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