Bill Hennessy is co-founder of the St. Louis Tea Party, self-published political guru and a sales guy who also works in tech. He's also an angry man with a message: Blame "the left" for everything wrong in the world. Hennessy has a platform and a voice and he's not afraid to use it, particularly in furtherance of his primary goal, which he lays out in a post castigating fellow Tea Party agitators for failing to put a stop to a sales tax increase:
The tea party is out to destroy the left in America. If we’re not going to do that—if we’re going to just wave yellow flags and wear clever t-shirts—then let’s go back to our regular programming.
Seriously, ask yourself not what you believe, but what you will DO. The time for standing in a park shouting is over. It’s time for action.
Ordinarily Hennessy's threat would be a shruggable event. The politics of personal destruction don't play all that well on the main stage, and the idea of "destroying the left" reeks of John Bircherism with a large dose of indoctrination by right-wing anti-taxers.
Except for this: Bill Hennessey, right-wing radio pundit Dana Loesch, and Big Government publisher Andrew Breitbart are using Kenneth Gladney's bogus injuries as their proxy for race-baiting and union bashing to leverage gains in the upcoming midterm elections.
After all, war is war. When you're out to destroy people, truth just doesn't seem to make that much of a difference. It doesn't seem to matter that Gladney's injuries didn't come close to matching up with what he claims was done to him, or that his original "lawyer" was also his employer, or that the whole dustup began over insulting imagery on buttons he was handing out at a town hall meeting. For these folks, and Hennessy in particular, it's war. All-out, scorched-earth kind of war.
Adam at St. Louis Activist Hub has put together a timeline of false accusations, outright lies, and machinations to promote Gladney's case and discredit not only the Obama administration, but anyone whose politics fall to the left of, well, just about anyone. It's pretty damning, no matter how many blustery posts they write claiming otherwise.
Still. I could shake my fist in the air and write it all off as more of the same, but there's this one thing that keeps nagging at me. Andrew Breitbart, Bill Hennessy and Dana Loesch are also associated with American Majority. American Majority is funded by the Sam Adams Alliance. The Sam Adams Alliance has a newly-established relationship with close Dick Armey associate and former chief of staff Denis Calabrese. Denis Calabrese is also founder and principal of The Patriot Group, a lobbying firm established with the goal of "lobbying with backbone."
Hennessy's most recent post links to the American Majority 'grassroots summit' in Kansas City this weekend. One of the featured speakers is Eric O'Keefe, Chairman of the Sam Adams Alliance, also on the board of Wisconsin Club for Growth and a former director of Americans for Limited Government. ALG has been associated with Howard Rich and Grover Norquist.
Scroll down a bit further on the page and you'll find the Koch connection through the Americans for Prosperity Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska sponsorships.
So it goes once again. These so-called grass roots activists are really all just part of the thug wing of the Republican party. If we were to analyze the DNA of the St. Louis Tea Party, we'd find Jack Abramoff, Grover Norquist, Charles Koch, and a bunch of College Republicans on the main strand.
