From R. Emmett Tyrrell's March 12 The Washington Times column:

There has been yet another eruption of violence from what our liberal friends a year or so ago were wont to call “the angry left.” However, if you read The Washington Post, you might think this recent outburst of violence came from talk radio.

The angry leftist behind the violence was John Patrick Bedell, 36, who, on the evening of March 4, walked up to an entrance of the Pentagon, pulled a gun on two Pentagon guards, Jeffrey Amos and Marvin Carraway, and was fatally shot. Both guards were wounded.

In the aftermath of this attack, it was reported that Bedell was a pot-smoking intellectualoid from California who had left word on the Internet that, according to his findings, a “coup regime” took over Washington at the time of President Kennedy's assassination and has governed the country “up to the present day.” What is more, the “coup regime,” according to Bedell, was complicit in Sept. 11, 2001. This judgment might strike you as extreme, but apparently it is not, at least not on the left. You will recall that President Obama's recently resigned environmental czar, Van Jones, had signed a petition to this effect before being invited into the administration.

In The Post's report on Bedell's assault - headlined “Pentagon Shooter's Erratic Journey” - a high school classmate recalled: “I remember [Bedell] being a sweet-natured, funny peacenik.” Another acquaintance reported to The Post that Bedell was a heavy marijuana user, and elsewhere, one of Bedell's brothers reported that he was a perpetual student who, so far as the brother knew, never held a job while bouncing from campus to campus and developing his esoteric theories. All in all, this glassy-eyed ideologue surely was a man of the left, the infantile left to be sure, but the left.

[...]

Thus John Patrick Bedell, a life-long member of the angry left, gets himself killed while assaulting the Pentagon, and the pious journalists at The Washington Post lump the poor guy in with right-wing militias. It is shoddy journalism. Much worse, it is a shocking act of disrespect for the dead.

Previously:

Boehlert: The Pentagon shooter, insurrectionism, and right-wing bloggers