Incompetent dopehead pipe-bomber as dangerous as al-Qaeda, lefty implies

Pathetic Loser No. 1:

Police said no charges have been filed against Mark Campano, 56. Police found 30 completed pipe bombs in his apartment along with components to make more, plus 17 guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
Campano is in an Akron hospital with injuries received when one of the bombs exploded. . . .
Campano is a former anesthesiologist who lost his medical license in 2005 because of an addiction to the drug clonidine, according to state records. He had similar problems with the drug as far back as 1994 when he was cited by the West Virginia Board of Medicine.

And here's what a former neighbor said about him:

Barbara Vachon lived next door to Campano at the Center Park Place Apartments for several years and said he was a big reason she moved.
"He was always trying to get me and another neighbor to listen to anti-government tapes and watch anti-government videos," said Vachon. "I would never watch them. He was some kind of radical, and he didn't believe in the government."
"There was a steady stream of creepy visitors going in and out of his apartment," she said.

Well, yeah, the government took away his medical license and busted him for drugs, so an "anti-government" attitude might be expected. Criminals in general are "anti-government." But now meet Pathetic Loser No. 2:

Of course, if this had been a Muslim extremist caught with such an arsenal, we'd be getting talk-show panels on Hannity featuring Michelle Malkin ranting at length about the threat of Islamic jihad, blah blah blah. Not to mention chatty discussion on Fox and Friends and Morning Joe.
But instead, because he's just a white anti-government extremist, hey, let's just give it a big shrug.

Note the apples-and-oranges comparison involved here. A Muslim extremist might be connected to al-Qaeda -- you know, 9/11, embassy bombings, "death to infidels," that kind of thing -- whereas this dopehead loser guy would be connected to . . . ?

Michelle Malkin! Sean Hannity! Fox News!

UPDATE: One of the things that annoys me about this lefty's presentation of the dopehead pipebomber as an "anti-government extremist" is how it is typical of the way liberals argue. Given the liberal predominance in academia and media, liberals become accustomed to debating everything on their own terms.

The only issues that matter are the issues that matter to liberals. And when it comes to discussing those issues, they only wish to discuss certain facts, which can have only one meaning. As much as they love to whine (when losing) that no one recognizez the ambiguity and nuance of the issues, it is liberals who are always oversimplifying things.

Go back to the Matthew Shepard murder, which liberals insisted was a simple story of homophobia, of society's hateful intolerance, of the evils of Christian conservatives, and the need for hate-crime protection for gays.

Alas, the facts didn't fit this narrative. Matthew Shepard was not killed by "society," or by Christian conservatives, he was killed by a couple of two-bit hoodlums. Both of Shepard's killers had records of petty crime (one for dope possession, one for burglary) and neither had any connection to any religious or political organizations at all.

Yet to hear the Matthew Shepard story as told by liberals, you might have thought Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson were hard-core Republican operatives, personally trained as assassins by Jerry Falwell and sent to Wyoming by James Dobson with orders to kill a gay man.

But anyone who tried to point out this discrepancy between the reality of Shepard's murder and the symbolic mythology of "The Martydom of St. Matthew the Gay," was accused of de facto homophobia. In other words, to contest the liberal narrative -- the just-so story of saintly victimhood -- was to invite accusations of complicity in murder. The facts of the case (the identity of the criminals and the nature of their crime) were subsumed by the political template.

So here is this dopehead pipebomber in Ohio -- a genuine menace to society, no doubt -- yet liberals insist the most important facts to liberals are not, inter alia, his evident incompetence or his long history of drug addiction. No, they say, the only thing that matters is that he liked tto "listen to anti-government tapes and watch anti-government videos."

What kind of videos and tapes were these? Heritage Foundation seminars? Alex Jones 9/11 Truth videos? Triumph of the Will? We don't know. There are all manner of things that might be characterized as "anti-government," from libertarianism to anarchism to conspiracy theories. Exactly what Campano's political views were, we don't know and frankly, at this point, it's irrelevant. He wasn't arrested for his ideology, but for making illegal explosives.

Yet here comes the liberal temper tantrum, that this "anti-government extremist" is not getting the same sort of media coverage that he would receive if his name was Abdul and he were inviting his neighbors to watch jihad videos. OK, that's arguably true -- but what's the point?

The point is simply that liberals are desperate to find a symbolic villain who can be used to illustrate the danger of "anti-government sentiment" -- hello, Clay County, Kentucky! -- to serve as an indictment of Glenn Beck, the Tea Party movement and conservatism in general. And thus the bizarre attempt to make the Ohio dopehead pipebomber analogous to al Qaeda, as if the logical alternative to the Bush administration's War On Terror should be an Obama administration War On Right-Wing Extremists.

We could laugh at this, were it not for the reality that such loopy ideas can have disastrous consequences. In the late 1990s, the Clinton administration awared a $1 million Department of Justice grant to Mark Pitcavage to create a program to do "anti-terrorism" training for state and local police. Pitcavage's expertise? You guessed it: Right-wing extremism. So while al Qaeda was plotting the 9/11 attacks, the DOJ was training law enforcement to keep their eyes peeled for militia crackpots.

Now think about the amount of law enforcement manpower devoted to investigating the alleged "anti-government sentiment" in Kentucky that turned out to be suicide. And then compare that to the Army's seeming indifference to the warning signs of the Fort Hood killer.

Ask some of the survivors at Fort Hood if they think we're paying too much attention to Islamic extremism.