People Teabaggers Blame for the Kenneth Gladney Incident

As I've written on multiple occasions, I think there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about Kenneth Gladney and David Brown's story about what happened outside of Russ Carnahan's town hall on August 6th. In fact, I think their story is inconsistent with what we can see in the video. But, just for the sake of argument, let's imagine that their description of that's night's events were completely true and could somehow miraculously be made to correspond to the video. What could we conclude in such a case?

To review, their story is that Gladney was outside selling buttons and handing out "Don't Tread On Me" flags, when Elston McCowan approached him and asked, "What kind of n** would sell this?" On their story, Gladney snatched his stuff back from McCowan and McCowan started hitting Gladney. They then claim that Perry Molens joined in and started beating Gladney as well. If this is what really happened, then who do you think should be blamed for the incident? McCowan? Molens?

Oh, you poor naive little communist. In fact, as has been documented by Jim Durbin, Dana Loesch, Gateway Pundit, Andrew Breitbart, and Glenn Beck, this incident was not the result of a momentary altercation, but in fact was clearly the result of a Massive Government Conspiracy! Below, I kid you not, is a list of just some of the people that these teabaggers have claimed are directly responsible for the fight between Kenneth Gladney and Elston McCowan:

• President Obama, of course
• White House Adviser David Axelrod
• White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina
• Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement Buffy Wicks
  
• Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius
• Health Care for America Now Director Margarida Jorge
• SEIU President Andy Stern
• AFL-CIO President John Sweeney
• Representative Russ Carnahan
• Carnahan Spokesperson Sara Howard
• County Executive Charlie Dooley, a (GASP!) former union member!
• St. Louis County Counselor Patricia Reddington
• St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCullough

Quite an impressive government conspiracy no? And for all that work, all this massive conspiracy was able to accomplish was to get in a couple punches on a guy selling buttons. I wonder what the next massive government conspiracy will be. Ding dong ditching Glenn Beck's mansion? Hiding a whoopee cushion on Limbaugh's chair? I guess the possibilities are endless, when you have an all-powerful oppressive government like Obama's.

Is the St. Louis Tea Party Misreporting Another Altercation? UPDATE: Yes, it looks like they are.

Just as they did with the altercation between Kenneth Gladney and Elston McCowen, it looks like the St. Louis tea party is going way beyond the facts to try to shape a media narrative that a tea party protester was attacked at their weekly "K and N" protests. Bill Hennessy, Dana Loesch, and Adam Sharp all are reporting that a tea party activist was attacked, based on the reports of Bob McCarty. You can read McCarty's blog post here and see his highly edited video about the incident here:



Obviously, all of the facts are not out yet, and I'm happy to see what the full evidence is before making any judgments. However, since the teabaggers are already trying to drive the media narrative, I think it's worth pointing out several reasons to be skeptical about this story:

• 1. The teabaggers crossed over and were on the pro-healthcare reform side of the road when the incident happened.
• 2. McCarty's video is clearly highly edited and full of McCarty's attempts to create a narrative for the incident. If anyone is expected to take it seriously, McCarty should release his full, unedited video from the day's events.
• 3. McCarty is a highly questionable source of information. He publicly entertains the idea that the Oklahoma City bombing was actually a plot by Muslim extremists and that the government is covering this fact up.
• 4. Even McCarty admits that the teabagger pulled the woman to the ground.
• 5. The beginning of McCarty's video of the incident clearly shows the teabagger man, but not the pro-healthcare woman, being held back:

Of course, none of these consdierations would cause the tea party's opportunistic leaders to hesitate for even a second about declaring it a "union attack!" But the rest of us will keep an eye out for more information.

UPDATE: A quote from a friend who was there:

Teabaggers crossed the road and tried to provoke us. They had video recorders and wanted us to throw the first punch. Didn't work - so one of their guys (carrying an anti-Obama sign) grabbed a woman from our ranks by the throat and punched her. Prince of a man. He was detained. Cops arrived and all those video recorders were gone. Imagine that. Charges filed.

Surprise, surprise.