TheAgitator.com
Teabagging
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009My friend Tim Lee pithily observed on Twitter that the tea partiers are in a lot of ways similar to the anti-war protesters from several years ago. I tend to agree with them, but they make it very difficult to take them seriously. And like the anti-war folks, they’re letting their cause get hijacked by a variety of other causes, too, including anti-immigration and anti-gay protesters, and, now, many of the mainstream GOP hacks that had no problem growing the federal government back when they were in power.
All of that said, the following video made my day. Mass Media Research Center email deluge to the FCC starts in 5…4…3…
The vid was hilarious. Ah, ya gotta love that sophomoric mind ;)
He has to be doing this on purpose:
Happy Teabagging!
CNN had a story about Fox News supporting these tea bag gatherings and how that isn’t very fair and balanced which I thought was hilarious from a network that has slowly but surely been adopting every highly biased, tabloid-style, reality-TV-like, talk show formatted, innovation Fox has come up with.
Comcast in Atlanta doesn’t carry MSNBC. Videos like this one make me wish for a viable alternative, so that I could jump board.
“That’s tea bagging in a nutshell.”
I guess I’ve been doing tea bagging wrong all these years. I don’t plan on changing.
If everybody fed up with taxes held an actual tea bagging protest at their state’s capital, it would be MUCH more effective than the tea party tax protests that are planned.
Dibs on Nancy Pelosi!
“Dick Army”
I see what you did there, nobahdi.
Jozef, Comcast in Atlanta does carry MSNBC but it’s just not part of the cheaper digital packages. I think you can getting by going one up to Preferred or something. Now, whether it’s worth paying extra for MSNBC is truly up for debate.
The fact that the Republicans are now again suddenly the party of fiscal responsibility is so transparently self-serving and two-faced that it’s amazing they have any adherents left. On the other hand, it isn’t like the major parties are exactly a haven for deep thinkers. The typical republican probably hasn’t noticed any inconsistency at all. What a bunch of fuckin’ idiots.
It makes one wonder how we ever got enough dumb ass politicians on the same page to get the Constitution ratified. It must have just been slipped in there with a bunch of other shit they never read.
I had exactly this same analysis when I wrote about the tea parties almost a month ago.
‘teabagging’… teehee. Maybe I just have a dirty mind, but don’t these idiots watch “Sex and The City”?
Wow, I don’t know how David Schuster made it through that segment without breaking out laughing… after the first ten seconds I had to close my office door and bite my tongue while watching the rest of it to keep from cracking up. That was hilarious! Nice find, Radley!
“My friend Tim Lee pithily observed on Twitter that the tea partiers are in a lot of ways similar to the anti-war protesters from several years ago. I tend to agree with them, but they make it very difficult to take them seriously.”
And that is why I typically leave political blogging to people like you Radley (and Jim Henley, Julian Sanchez and a few others). You put it much better than I could’ve.
~Jon
“The fact that the Republicans are now again suddenly the party of fiscal responsibility is so transparently self-serving…”
It is an amazing scam that they play beautifully. Dems get some POTUS time, Reps get some POTUS time. One party gets in office and starts pissing people off while they all get rich, the other party courts the sheeple for the next round. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The good news is it can’t last forever. The bad news we all die at the end.
“Both (Beck and Hannity) are looking forward to an upclose and personal taste of teabagging…”
I just bet.
@ #4 | Jozef
Stop complaining, we have monopolies to protect.
That made my day.
“You’re gonna need a dick army”
“The bad news we all die at the end.”
I think that’s a good thing. I mean, what’s the alternative? A zombie apocalypse?
I, for one, welcome our new zombie overlords.
Color me naive but I’m confused as to all the contempt being directed at the Tea Partiers. This strikes me as perfect evidence of the oft-repeated claim that Libertarians will never form a cohesive party because we’re all too busy accusing each other of not being actual, for-realsies, gosh darn PURE enough with our respective philosophies regarding the whole liberty thing.
It seems to me that the sudden emergence of a whole swath of previously politically apathetic Americans engaging in a grassroots effort to push back, even if just a little bit, against an ever growing government should be greeted with with some relief on our part. With the 10th Amendment suddenly finding itself in the spotlight in State capitals, and a growing number of people openly questioning just how much power they really want the Fed to have we should be right there alongside saying “Yes! *THIS* is part of what we’ve been trying to get tell you all these years!” rather than “LOLZ!!!11!!! ‘Teabagger’ OMGWTFBBQ!”
Scott,
Because this “sudden emergence” as you put it is by the same people who when in power, over and over again, have demonstrated that they dont give a damn about the 10th amendent (or any other).
Its the same shit they talk every single time. Why buy into it now?
Listening to NPR tonight on the way home tonight, they referred to Glenn Beck as a libertarian. I know he keeps calling himself that even as he keep talking up what the government should do to straighten out… well, everything. . If Glenn beck is the new face of libertarianism, we’re doomed.
If I can get the word out to enough tall athletic women that I’m really Brad Pitt, surely some of them will believe it. Ya think?
I’m with Scott here. I have no idea why the issue is being met with such contempt. I don’t know what the Venn Diagrams look like but I think there were a lot of folks on the right that were against the power grabs and spending of the Republicans in power. Now that there’s no visible opposition in Congress and the administration can basically just keep spending what it wants my guess is a lot of people are looking for some sort of outlet to express their disapproval.
ktc2, I think you just proved Scott’s point.
1) The tea party protests were not created “by the same people who, when in power… demonstrated that they don’t give a damn about the 10th amendment.” Rather, people who supported those people who didn’t give a damn about the 10th amendment are now trying to latch onto the movement.
2) EVEN IF it were true that this was coming from the Bush administration, who cares? If you only support limited government when it is backed by people who r kewl, then you aren’t a libertarian, you are a whore. That applies equally to those here as it does to the whores in the RNC.
CDH, “the movement” was the people who were in power for the last 8 years to begin with. This isn’t some grassroots uprising, but is instead an astroturf operation by large politically connected PR firms.
The real head behind the Tea Parties is FreedomWorks, a PR firm headed by Dick Armey, which has a history of running astroturf campaigns, and was famously busted for planting their Iowa state director as a questioner at a Bush town hall. FreedomWorks was even ultimately behind the ChicagoTeaParty.com website, which they’d registered through a subsidiary group six months before Rick Santelli had uttered the phrase, and sprang to life shortly after he did.
PR firms have been behind the initial organizing, and the right-wing media picked it up from there. There’s nothing grassroots about it, and “the movement” is the same people who brought us the mess we’re in today.
I’m glad to see David Schuster prove that MSNBC is just as juvenile and spiteful as he seems to think FoxNews is. Everyone has heard the jokes about “tea bagging” and “dick army” related to this event, and I indulged my inner thirteen-year-old and giggled, too. But, let’s not kid ourselves that there is anything clever about it.
And, when FNC points out how orchestrated the “grass roots” media events of the left are, commentators on the other networks like MSNBC are quick to point to Fox displaying its right wing bias. (And that’s fair for them to do.) So, by its own standard, what is MSNBC displaying here? Uh huh. Exactly.
(BTW, I very rarely tune in to FNC and this isn’t a defense of them.)
I agree with the “don’t get fooled again” notion some have expressed here. The conservatives who support this sort of thing need to remember it the next time their side is in power and doing the same thing and not start making excuses for it. Same as the lefties who protested Bush’s power grabs and were quick to apply the term “imperial presidency” to his administration now have to be honest enough to apply the same term – and just as loudly – now that their guy is holding the brass ring.
That said, I have nothing against the tea partiers and I don’t especially care who organized the events. The more important thing is that most of the people who show up actually think there ought to be some limits on government. I know some folks who are thinking of going and my admonition to them was to remember that the event will be a failure if the targets of derision are just Obama and the Democrats instead of everyone who believes in government solutions to problems, including the GOP when they held the reigns and started the bailout mess.
thefncrow, actually the movement began with Libertarians in Illinois talking about doing in just in Chicago, the call was taken up and spread nationwide by Campaign for Liberty (the group formed by Ron Paul’s supporters), and Restore the Republic (the group started by Aaron Russo to support Ron Paul’s candidacy). It spread thru Meetup Groups for those two organization and the Libertarain Party and has been in active planning for two months now. At my local event, there will be people from ALL political corners participating. The GOP has recently “signed on” and are acting as tho they planned it all from the beginning. They are saying they “will approve all signs” so that it is assured to be a NON-partisan event. They won’t get away with that, because we who actually planned it wanted a multi-partisan event, we know the GOP was late to this and is just using us and the event for their own ends, but so are we using the event for our own ends. You can bet we will be making sure all non-republicans attending know who did what in the planning.
as I said, multi-partisan event.
#19 Scott
You are exactly right.
As for the tea party critics, you seem to fall into two camps. One camp which is so blinded by Bush loathing that they can’t see the much greater danger from the current ruling majority. And the other camp which really thinks the new majority is just peachy and any possible threat to the new regimes power must be ruthlessly aborted.
Twitter might be fine for letting the world know that your cat just crapped in the plant or that you’ll be 15 minutes late for lunch, but this is a perfect example why it’s just gimmicky and unhelpful when it comes to conveying larger ideas.
OK, so Tim Lee thinks the tea party/antiwar analogy is good, because they’re both ineffective. Well, all right. So, um… that’s it? Ineffective how? I can’t agree or argue with the guy because I have no idea what he’s actually saying.
Isn’t this basically reducing rhetorically gifted people to the level of junior-high debate? “No I’m not,” “Yes you are.” It strikes me as such a strange wall to willingly build around the expression of one’s thoughts.
“As for the tea party critics, you seem to fall into two camps.”
Well, I’m by myself, then. I think the whole thing is bloody horseshit, but not for the reasons that the myopes here do. They think it’s a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. That’s fucking stoopid, but that’s who they are.
No; the thing wrong it is that there is no philosophy under it. These are people who’ve lived with generations of the rot that brought them to the point where the best they can do is sit up and blink their eyes at what’s happening. They don’t really know, and they never really cared. They still don’t.
This is a moment of indigestion. They’ll get over it, and The Endarkenment will proceed.
Look: whatever the Tea Parties might have “started out as”, that’s not what they are now, and that’s not what’s being mocked. If you really think that whatever high media profile this “movement” has right now is the outgrowth of some libertarian/Paulite impulse, then you are willfully ignoring the FNC/Pajamas/Astroturf pimping of them (a la Glenn Beck headlining a $500-a-plate fundraiser for them). If you think that because they (might have) started out as simon-pure limited government citizens’ revolts, that means it’s okay to keep on truckin’ in a “multi-partisan” way, then you better be worried about the fleas you’re gonna wake up with after lying down w/ dogs like Cavuto, Malkin et. al. The rank stupidity, hypocrisy, intellectual vapidity/inconsistency, etc. of the Tea Partiers (in their CURRENT form, for you pedants) is staggering.
And for those of you baffled by the contempt directed at this phenomenon, I suggest you attend one and take your own informal survey of the attendees to ascertain their feelings toward the Patriot Act, FISA violations, the death of habeas corpus, Gitmo, waterboarding, extraordinary renditions, the War On (Some People Who Use Some Kinds Of) Drugs, and on and on. I think you’ll find that most – not all, but most – of the people ranting and raving about “limited government” are sunshine patriots and summer soldiers when it comes to any violation of civil liberties, and that their half-witted understandings of “Taxation Without Representation” and who spends what are their only, and very bad, reasons for being there.
Dave Krueger “It makes one wonder how we ever got enough dumb ass politicians on the same page to get the Constitution ratified. It must have just been slipped in there with a bunch of other shit they never read.”
lol brilliant!
And for those of you baffled by the contempt directed at this phenomenon, I suggest you attend one and take your own informal survey of the attendees to ascertain their feelings toward the Patriot Act, FISA violations, the death of habeas corpus, Gitmo, waterboarding, extraordinary renditions, the War On (Some People Who Use Some Kinds Of) Drugs, and on and on. I think you’ll find that most – not all, but most – of the people ranting and raving about “limited government” are sunshine patriots and summer soldiers when it comes to any violation of civil liberties, and that their half-witted understandings of “Taxation Without Representation” and who spends what are their only, and very bad, reasons for being there.
Yeah, their ideological impurities disqualify them from having valid concerns about taxation and government spending.
Except that the anti war protests turned out about two million people across the US and largely mainstream…the one in NYC was immense. These will be lucky if they turn out 30,000 across the country. And what are they protesting about? The fact that the top marginal rate is going up 3%. I doubt there are many $200k plus folks at these rallies so most of them have just had a tax cut. In reality it’s a coalition of people with grievances of one sort and another who are angry they lost the election. For some reason the right seems to have made a concerted decision to cooperate fully with the Obama admin’s strategy to portray them as complete whackoes.
[...] -Radley Balko [...]
Just got in from the Concord NH tea party (NOT A TEA BAG PARTY…that’s tonight!).
Started off with the good old pledge of allegiance. Then a good word for our troops overseas protecting our freedom. Then a bunch of words about Obama’s budget. So…the right wing was smiling proudly after the first 20 minutes.
There was a mix of some Gov. Lynch directed venom, and we’ve been invaded by Mass-hole Democrats and the local Republicans are anxious to vent.
There were also die-hard libertarians (I recognized more than a few of them) in the audience.
John Birch Society arrived an hour after it all got started.
Sign grammar was pretty good for New Hampshire!
Message of the day: YOU need to run for office. Get busy.
My skepticism with the Tea Party is that nothing short of several complete collapses of the country and millions of lives diminished will convince people to limit government. But, I’m an optimist…in that eventually we’ll get there…just not in my life…or anyone I know.
I have no idea who created the tea party movement, but Michelle (whom I know Radley doesn’t respect) says it is a spontaneous movement.
http://michellemalkin.com/2009/04/15/a-tax-day-tea-party-cheat-sheet-how-it-all-started/
[...] has been a fair amount of grumping that today’s Tea Parties were originally the idea of various libertarian-oriented [...]
Even if these people come down libertarian on most every issue, the unfortunate truth is that they still going to vote for representatives (probably GOP) who come to small-government events, wave, and return to DC to perpetuate the problem. I live in Missoula, Montana, and there was a statewide poll that asked Montanans about their positions on social and economic issues. The result? A large majority were for free-markets and personal freedom on social issues.
Yeah, there’s a word for that. Typically, the conclusion the papers came to was that this made Montana a swing state. I’m not sure how it shows that Montanans support moderate amounts of activities they’re against.
This used to confuse me…until I was part of an official Libertarian Party campus organization, for two years. It was simply…fuck. Some very intelligent people, but largely a zoo monkey shit-fight.
So I can’t blame people for not supporting a party that nominated, at the statewide level (thrice), a man who TURNED HIMSELF BLUE drinking silver out of fear of Y2K, and was more rabid conservative than libertarian, in any case.
Which brings us to these Tea Parties people, who are limited government on this issue, if nothing else. We’d like to align ourselves with this group on this issue, and nothing else; but when the DNC has jettisoned any chance of picking up this voting bloc, and they can’t bring themselves to vote for a laughable LP, they end up in a GOP in which they do not constitute a large enough percentage to influence primaries.
I did not vote, due to a lack of options.
[...] Balko notes the similaritybetween the Tea Partiers and the Iraq War protesters: I tend to agree with them, but they make it [...]
Brad,
You missed the third, and largest, faction that think you guys are just pathetic jokes. We’re not blind. We’re not scared. We’re laughing our assess off at you.
Yeah, their ideological impurities disqualify them from having valid concerns about taxation and government spending.
They point is that they are lying (maybe to themselves) about what bothers them.
If someone says “I dont like Gov’t spending” but ONLY objects to gov’t spending on X and not on Y and Z, then the logical conclusion is that he does NOT dislike “gov’t spending”. He really just dislikes X. Calling him out on that is legitimate.
[...] and the frustrated can feel both beleagured and self-righteous complaining about . . . well, whathaveyou — that’s not as important as the fact that they’ve all gotten together in one big [...]
Several MSNBC shows, including Countdown and Rachel Maddow are available online. If you own some portable media player(like an Ipod or a Iphone) you can subscribe via Itunes and watch it anywhere.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8132577/
It´s wonderful to do while traveling by bus or train… I find that economically these shows are horrible, but I watch Olbermann just to see him mocking O´Reilly and Limbaugh…
Hey, at least the antiwar demonstrations had a clear objective, and they didn´t used stupid costumes.
This post’s suggestion that tea party protesters had no problem with big government in the past — Andrew Sullivan’s unfounded claim that the tea party protests had no “constructive and specific argument about how they intend to reduce spending” — are erroneous.
Many of the tea parties protested a specific spending program: the $800 billion stimulus package, which the Congressional Budget Office says will actually shrink the economy “in the long run.”
The “tea party” protests against out-of-control government spending have been very clear in identifying what wasteful spending they object to. One example is the stimulus package, which Obama falsely sold to the public as needed to prevent “irreversible decline,” but which the CBO repeatedly pointed out would eventually shrink the economy. Many protests expressly targeted the stimulus package. See the links in my blog posts at Openmarket entitled “Slandering the Tea Parties.”
Another example is the Obama Administration’s mortgage bailout, which would benefit even high-income people with modest mortgages (see the “I can’t afford your mortgage” sign at the Olathe tea party, for example).
For having the temerity to protest broken promises (like Obama’s claim that he would enact a “net spending cut,” discussed in my blog post “Blind to Obama’s Broken Promises”) and out-of-control spending, the protesters have been called “despicable” by a liberal Congresswoman, and attacked in the left-wing blogosphere in the most vicious language as “redneck, racist Republicons” and as “a bunch of white old people and rednecks” who “got together and tried to start a revolution…to drive the Fascist/Communist n****r out of the White House and stop the f**s from stealing their children.”
As a Harvard-educated, arugula-eating, urban dweller whose office hosted the end of the Washington tea party, I find these claims baffling. I am certainly not afraid of my Asian, black, and Hispanic relatives, my French-born wife, or the gay neighbor whose children play with my daughter.
Andrew Sullivan derides the tea parties as “opposition to the Obama administration’s spending plans, manned by people who made no serious objections to George W. Bush’s.”
I did too make “serious objections to George W. Bush’s” spending plans. I condemned his costly prescription-drug entitlement in the Washington Times, and repeatedly condemned the $160 billion Bush “stimulus rebates” in 2008. I publicly called his $700 billion Wall Street “bailout bill dangerous, inflationary, unnecessary, and unconstitutional.” And I condemned his multibillion dollar auto bailout.
And contrary to Sullivan’s claims, I do indeed have a “constructive and specific argument about how . . . to reduce spending and debt and borrowing” — cancel the wasteful $800 billion stimulus package, most of which has not been spent yet, and may cause inflation when it finally is.
This post’s suggestion that tea party protesters had no problem with big government in the past is erroneous. I publicly criticized Bush’s prescription drug entitlement, use of torture, his Wall Street and auto bailouts, and his “stimulus” rebates. And my office hosted the end of the Washington tea party.
Moreover, the tea parties offered constructive solutions for reining in big government (contrary to Andrew Sullivan’s unfounded claim that the tea party protests had no “constructive and specific argument about how they intend to reduce spending”).
Many of them protested a specific spending program: the $800 billion stimulus package, which the Congressional Budget Office says will actually shrink the economy “in the long run.”
Obama falsely sold the stimulus package to the public as needed to prevent “irreversible decline,” even though the CBO pointed out it would eventually shrink the economy. Many protests expressly targeted the stimulus package. See the links in my blog posts at Openmarket entitled “Slandering the Tea Parties.”
Tea parties also targeted the Obama Administration’s mortgage bailout, which would benefit even high-income people with modest mortgages (see the “I can’t afford your mortgage” sign at the Olathe tea party, for example).
The money appropriated for the stimulus package has mostly not been spent yet, and much money could be saved by canceling it — and the mortgage bailouts, which also have just begun.
The talking heads on MSNBC have gone a little further: Tax protesters are racist retards, you know, because the president’s black.
http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2009/04/17/janeane-garafalo-says-tea-parties-were-for-rednecks/
For what it’s worth, MSNBC’s parent company’s banking division — GE Financial — got $140 billion in bailout money.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/105984-general-electric-gets-a-140b-bailout-what-s-the-point-of-aaa
Look. Whether you like the tea parties or not. Whether you feel they’re a genuine grassroots effort or not. It doesn’t really matter.
What matters is that you have a whole lot of people who are either confused, pissed off, or emotionally manipulated enough to attend.
So instead of griping and making fun, why don’t you get your ass out there and get these people’s names, invite them to a meeting, and start educating them about the truth.
All of us woke up at some point or another because someone taught us or influenced us to learn more about liberty and the constitution. It takes people who are willing to be patient and to kindly teach the truth and point out error.
These people are ready to learn; I know because I talked to many of them. They’re ready for something new. Something that works. But yes, they are ignorant in many ways. So what? What matters is that they’re ready to learn now.
If all we do is mock this movement, we’re simply snobs and idiots. If you actually want the message of liberty to spread, you have to do something other than complain.