Here’s what Bouie dances around, but never confronts – was Brown right?

Presumably, at least, Bouie would agree that the evil presented by the entrenchment of slavery was so great that it was at least a close question, for many people. Certainly many people (including, as Bouie notes, Frederick Douglass, for probably political reasons) condemned Brown, but his actions were not considered so far outside the realm of possibility that his condemnation was considered automatic, or even universal. And after the war was joined, Union soldiers commonly marched to the song of his martyrdom, “John Brown’s Body.” In the fullness of time, history has come to view Brown largely in a manner consistent with a martyr for a righteous cause.

Robert Lewis Dear is not that. There is no real indication that he understood the gravity of what he was doing, he carelessly killed people not even involved with the abortion industry (including a pro-life cop) and by all accounts was a loner with very serious mental illness. As I noted above, Scott Roeder is pretty clearly a better analogy, but Dear has been the first person to (at least possibly) attack an abortion clinic since Planned Parenthood was caught on tape (despite their hilariously false protestations to the contrary) selling baby parts for money.

The simmering righteous anger a substantial portion of the country feels about these revelations has, quite frankly caused the ritual public condemnation of Dear by pro-lifers to be notably muted as compared with, say, Eric Rudolph.