St. Gladney de St. Louis clutches a “Don’t Tread On Me” flag and suffers quietly…

Those Tea Party thugs are a lot like Colonel Klink’s Nazis: they’d be funny in a cheap sitcom way if they weren’t causing the rest of us so much real-world harm. Latest example: one of the anti-Obamacare townhall meeting crashers, Kenneth Gladney, claims that liberal meanies beat him up just for expressing his First Amendment rights, and these same liberal meanies gave the 38-year-old martyr a boo-boo on his knee (not so “Gladney” after all, are we? [cue laugh-track]). But here’s the real punchline: the Tea Party martyr doesn’t have health insurance to cover his injuries–and that means no coverage for injuries sustained while fighting against a health care plan that would offer unemployed zeroes like him medical insurance. So naturally, Gladney is begging for handouts donations to help treat his boo-boo, and he’s teamed up with a local ambulance-chaser to see how much he can soak the liberals for, according to AP:

ST. LOUIS | Protesters are demanding justice for a man who was injured during fighting that erupted last week when audience members at a St. Louis-area aging forum began yelling about health care reform.

Backers of Kenneth Gladney, 38, of St. Louis, gathered Saturday at the offices of the Service Employees International Union for an event organized by the pro-limited government Tea Party coalition.

Gladney’s attorney, David Brown, received cheers from the crowd of about 200 people when he read a statement written by his client.

“A few nights ago there was an assault on my liberty, and on yours, too.” Brown read. “This should never happen in this country.”

Brown told the crowd that Gladney is accepting donations toward his medical expenses. Gladney told reporters he was laid off recently and has no health insurance.

Of course the Big White Elephant in this Tea Party martyr’s schtick isn’t just the fake whiplash injury and the hilarious Ron Kovacs wheelchair act, but the fact that…well Gladney is…you know, not of the Tea Party pigment. That’s not to say “more power to you.” The man is after all out of a job, the economy’s tough, and hey, you gotta hustle where the hustlin’s good, folks.

Like Shias with their martyrs, the Tea Baggers are now trying to use Gladney’s bad knee to drum up sympathy and support (and maybe a nice out-of-court settlement):

Gladney sat in a wheelchair, his knee bandaged, holding a flag that read: “Don’t Tread on Me.” Others who gathered at the union offices held signs with a slightly different version of the message: “Don’t Tread on Kenny.”

So here’s how it works: rich corporate backers, led by billionaire health care CEOs, want to kill health care reform because it might fuck up their chances of buying a second Aspen mansion or a third Gulfstream. So they rally a bunch of out-of-work, uninsured pissed-off losers, many of whom are willing to lay their lives on the line for the super-rich in order to ensure they stay rich while the shock-troops remain uninsured and down in the bottom. Now the Tea Bag suckers finally produced the martyr they were aiming for–an African-American with a scraped knee–and they’re already milking it with hilarious results:

Demand Justice! Denounce Violence! Saturday

at SEIU Office

August 7, 2009

DATE:  Saturday, August 8, 2009 (tomorrow)

TIME:  Noon

LOCATION:  SEIU Headquarters, 5585 Pershing Ave., Suite 130, St. Louis, MO 63112

The St. Louis Tea Party will hold a press conference and peaceable protest at SEIU Headquarters
5585 Pershing Ave., Suite 130, St. Louis, MO 63112 at Noon Saturday, August 8, 2009.

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The protest is to demand justice for Kenneth Gladney, an African-American conservative who was brutally beaten by 4 individuals, at least 2 of whom were identified as SEIU representatives. The beatings included racial slurs and required hospitalization of Mr. Gladney.

As videos show, the attack was unprovoked and no one retaliated against the union thugs.

This attack followed hours of taunts and verbal assaults by SEIU and ACORN members upon citizens gathered to express their views under the First Amendment. We believe this brutal beating is part of an organized plan to suppress dissent to the Administration’s planned seizure of the medical industry in the United States.

Anyone who believes in non-violent protest, in the rule of law, in the right of black men and women to express conservative political views, in the right to peaceably assemble, to speak freely, and to petition Congress for a redress of grievances is invited to attend.

The Tea Party specifically requests the NAACP and the ACLU to come out in support of Kenneth Gladney’s rights which were trampled by these hooligans. We call on Representative Russ Carnahan to denounce the beating. We call on President Obama to denounce the beatings. We call on St. Louis County to prosecute the assailants to fullest extent of the law.

But like the bad sitcom bozos they are, they screwed up even this simple task by hiring a martyr without health insurance. Making Gladney the Tea Party equivalent of Detective Nordberg in Naked Gun, crashing down the stairwell of shame to provide cheap laughs for us.

Det. Nordberg to Kenneth Gladney: “You too?”

Gladney is a pastiche of all these images: Ray Kovacs by way of Det. Nordberg multiplied by Cancer Boy cubed:

Stay tuned for more zany antics… and more misery and in-fighting among America’s 90-percent have-nots.

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

Click the cover & buy the book!

Read more: Cancer Boy, colonel klink, Det. Nordberg, freedomworks, Kenneth Gladney, Naked Gun, Tea Party, Mark Ames, Class War For Idiots

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