Coakley Staffer Knocks Reporter to the Ground

I guess his question as to why she could say, during her debate with Scott Brown, that the “Taliban are gone” in Afghanistan after Taliban blew up eight CIA officers in Afghanistan was too tough for her.

From the Weekly Standard reporter himself:

A tipster tells me that the man who was pushing me outside of a Capitol Hill fundraiser Tuesday night for Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley is Michael Meehan.

Meehan heads up a firm called Blue Line Strategic Communications along with his partner David DiMartino, who was outside the fundraiser with Coakley tonight and introduced himself to me there. TheAP reported on Monday that Meehan is also working for Coakley: “The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee also dispatched Michael Meehan, a media consultant with ties to Massachusetts, to assist the Coakley camp with messaging.”

Though I can’t say with 100 percent certainty, I think that Meehan is the man who shoved me into a metal railing Tuesday night.

Coakley’s strongarm appears to be a longtime Democrat party hack. No surprise there.

This, the video of the Coakley thug visibly knocking down, shoving, and harassing reporter John McCormack:

The thug appeared to shove McCormack back and prevent him from asking Coakley any questions. More:

McCormack said Coakley blew him off, and then he followed her for a few blocks until he was shoved by a man he believes was Meehan, who is working with the Coakley campaign.

“I ended up on the sidewalk. I was fine,” McCormack wrote in the Weekly Standard. “He helped me up from the ground, but kept pushing up against me, blocking my path toward Coakley down the street.”

When McCormack asked the man whom he worked for, he replied, “I work for me,” demanding to see McCormack’s credentials on a public street. After McCormack showed him his ID, he said he met up with Coakley halfway down the block, asking her question that she declined to answer.

Coakley is definitely amping up the negativity, suggesting that Brown’s grassroots supporters are “hate groups,” tossing around grandiose statements about her political stature (“If I don’t win, 2010 is going to be hell for Democrats“), apparently hiring union workers to rally for her:

The heat of Brown’s success online and his record $1 million dollar-in-a-day fundraising – coupled with the ethics complaint Coakley faces over the charge that she used state resources on her campaign, relying on SEIU to phone bank for her, her sagging poll numbers, (not to mention the embarrassing misspelling of the very state for which she’s campaigning in one of her commercials), are all taking a toll on her manufactured-to-win countenance.

She and the Democratic party are quickly learning that through Massachusetts, the American people are beginning to say “no.”