Posted by Brad @ 1:32 pm on April 15th 2009

Stephen Gordon on the Tea Parties

One of the commentators over at our friends The Liberty Papers managed to get on Rachel Maddow’s show. The segment is actually about the best examination I’ve seen of exactly what we’ve been talking about in relation to the Tea Party stuff. Go Stephen!

Seriously, this clip is well worth your time.

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Some of this is surely a function of…not sour grapes exactly, but the feeling you get when you lose ownership of something (that was probably never yours in the first place). But some of it is, I think, a very warranted mistrust of the Republican party being…not fair weather friends, exactly, but co-opting the style and tactics without necessarily taking the philosophy and ideas that generated them in the first place.

posted in: Videos

5 Comments »

  1. I was watching for six minutes before I caught the awesome title at the bottom of the screen: “Rival-Tea”

    Comment by Cameron — 4/15/2009 @ 5:28 pm

  2. Speaking of double meanings,

    I am amazed to learn that Laura and Eric at RSE had no idea until yesterday about the double entendre that is “teabagging”. That’s not a knock on them—it’s certainly not a “mainstream” sex term, but it bemuses me because I’ve actually been wondering how so many Republican operatives have been using the phrase “teabagging” in horrendously sexually explicit sentences without any sense of shame or at least juvenile delight.

    My (edited) reply to that post:

    Man, are you guys new to the internet or something? I figured it was just out of politeness that people were using the term “teabagging” and pretending to not notice the horrendously smutty double entendre.

    Cox, by the way, is right. I can tell you firsthand, as a fly on the wall during some of the official campaign and national grassroots planning in Nov/Dec 2007 (including for the Tea Party money bomb), that steering well clear of any iteration of the phrase “teabag” was an actual topic of conversation more than once. No joke. And we’d all agree, and then hit the bar and make endless riffs about the massive teabagging that was to shortly ensue. But we were real real careful to only say “tea party” and keep it steeped (heh) in Revolutionary War jargon. At least the slimeballs I did planning with, anyway.

    Another reason why Republican party operatives taking over the movements’ tactics and style might not translate as well as they might hope.

    We Ron Paulians considered these things!

    It’s particularly bad because believe me, the liberal grassroots have not taken any opportunity to miss the connotations. Kos and other sites have also instituted a strict rule to refer to the protesters only as “teabaggers” (which is actually pretty funny when you go through their coverage today, but I have the sense of humor of a 14 year old). I think part of the gag is that they figure more of their audiences will be in on the joke than the people they’re talking about.

    It’s sort of like your elderly grandmother overhearing you use the phrase “dirty sanchez” in impolite company, asks what it means, and embarrassed you try to cover for yourself by lying and saying it’s a humorous phrase for illegal immigrants. Then, at a dinner party weeks later, the subject of immigration comes up and you’re horrified to hear her pronounce to everybody in the room, “Dirty sanchezs are the worst. Every time I go to Home Depot I run into at least 12 of them before I even make it into the store. Although I will admit that when I needed some work done in my backyard one summer, the dirty sanchezs were too cheap to pass up.”

    Comment by Brad — 4/15/2009 @ 5:44 pm

  3. That last paragraph should have been beneath me, but isn’t.

    Comment by Brad — 4/15/2009 @ 5:45 pm

  4. A friend of mine said that Rachel Maddow had a guest the other day that understood the sexual connotation and that Rachel and the guest had some fun with it.

    The guy in that interview sounds like pinecrika when he talks.

    Comment by Jerrod — 4/15/2009 @ 6:26 pm

  5. That was Wonkette, ala Ann Marie Cox.

    Or actually it could have been any number of people. I think Maddow, David Shuster, Keith Olbermann, and others have all pretty much decided to run with it.

    Comment by Brad — 4/15/2009 @ 6:30 pm

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