Keith Olbermann And The Origins Of The Tea Bagger Moniker

by Melissa Clouthier | May 7, 2010 1:56 pm

Yesterday, Keith Olbermann called me out for my post shaming President Obama for using the derogatory term “tea bagger”. Here’s the video [thanks Tab Hale, for the help]:

As usual, Keith is wrong.

First, when the Tea Party folks used the term “tea bag”–as in, let’s send tea bags to Congress, they meant literal tea bags. In fact, many people didn’t even know what the term “tea bagging” meant and had to have it explained to them.

It was the liberal, some say closeted gay man, Anderson Cooper[1], who brought the notion of tea bags into the gutter. Remember this?

Uh yeah. It was so shocking and offensive, and this was more than A YEAR ago, that Greg Guttfeld called out Cooper and the rest of the adolescents in the press[2]:

So if there’s one great thing we learned from today’s Tea parties, it’s how Anderson Cooper spends his nights off. It had happened during a conversation with talking thumb, David Gergen, who had just noted that the tea party protestors had yet to find their voice. Cooper’s response: “It’s hard to talk when you’re teabagging.”

Now, if you’re too old or too high to get what’s going on, here’s the joke: The liberal-leaning media are goofing on the tea parties by invoking the term teabagging, a phrase used to describe an act of oral sex performed by a man – either on another man, woman, or in Alec Baldwin’s case — a cheeseburger.

And so you have Cooper’s joke — it’s just a shame he ripped off the shtick from David Shuster, who apparently has never met a joke he hasn’t beat to death like a hunter on a harp seal. On MSNBC, Shuster repeats testicle-based puns with a fervent relish not unlike an eight-year old boy who just can’t stop sniffing his fingers. And, this, coming from me. I’m mean — I always thought I was the king of obvious jokes, but I relinquish that crown — because the real obvious joke is Shuster.

So why is it the MSM finds it so easy to sneer at a group of protestors, when you’ve never seen them do the same with the bedraggled buffoons protesting environmental ills, animal testing or the WTO?

Well, first: the protests involve people they’ve never actually met. I mean, these are average folks — not professional sign carriers. Most of these people work for a living, and ration their marching for parades. Also, the media abhors these people because they question the ultimate goal of their Messiah. These protestors know wealth distribution when they see it, and they’re calling it out – because the media cannot bring themselves to do it for them. After all, if they did, that would hurt Obama’s feelings. And if you learned anything from high school — you never make fun of Mr. Popular.

Lastly, the media hates it when they can’t control the story. These tea parties were out of their hands from day one—a movement that was hard to figure and impossible to spin. So, why not make fun of it? Why not make ball jokes?

But hey, who am I to judge? Whatever gets you off on a Wednesday night, Anderson, when nothing else will.

So, no, the Tea Party movement did not call themselves “tea baggers”. The press started that.

What was so offensive to me, and what should offend even Keith Olbermann if he had any sense whatsoever, is that President Obama should be above such characterizations. But he’s not.

President Obama is willing to use a sexual term to quantify an element of the American public he disagrees with. Now, that puts him in the same immature and foolish category as Keith Olbermann and Anderson Cooper and no doubt, Keith is a-okay with that.

But thinking people should not be. The President should not be ridiculing a whole swath of the American people and using sexually degrading terms at that. He should be more respectful of his office and of those people.

How is my illustrating the crassness of the President by showing a picture of the act he labels people with, lacking decorum?

So, by calling out a lack of decorum, I lack decorum?

No, the President lacks decorum and refinement and a generous spirit. He is spiteful, petty, vindictive and nasty-mouthed. It’s embarrassing.

Keith Olbermann doesn’t see the big deal because he’s just the same. But he’s just a TV guy. It matters less–it still matters a little, but not much. The President shouldn’t even think these words and yet they fall out of his mouth.

And another thing: I’m tired of the Left lamenting the “lowering of the discourse”–including President Obama. Please. They’ve taking name-calling and marginalizing, demonizing and moralizing to a whole new hypocritical level. Yes, they are hypocrites. Flaming ones. So spare America the lecture about civility in public life.

The country will know civility again when the country has civilized leadership. Right now, it’s all Chicago style all the time. And it’s lame.

Endnotes:
  1. Anderson Cooper: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/matthew-balan/2009/04/15/cnns-anderson-cooper-its-hard-talk-when-youre-tea-bagging
  2. Greg Guttfeld called out Cooper and the rest of the adolescents in the press: http://www.dailygut.com/index.php?i=4169

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