Though this has been linked everywhere in the day since it's been posted, I can't help but link it, too, and agree with Scott that this is an instant classic in the Hall of Fame for Clueless Wingnuttery. It turns out that the wingnuts were utterly clueless about the slang term "teabag", used to describe sticking your testicles (if you happen to have them) on someone's face or in their mouth for sexual gratification or as the way frat boys punish each other for passing out drunk. Somehow, the group of people who never clued into this term---despite the fact that it's a widely photographed activity, and joked about by everyone from the characters on "Always Sunny In Philadelphia" to "Sex and the City" to John Waters---is the same group of people who think it's meaningful to protest the existence of taxes as a cover story for throwing a tantrum about having a black President. Who could have predicted this? Though, in hindsight, in makes sense. Teabagging brings people together, since everyone from frat boys to people who adore John Waters think that teabagging is funny. That kind of national unity across subcultures is the sort of thing that Obama campaigned for, and therefore it makes the 'nuts even crazier.
As John noted, both networks' "journalists" used the rallies as an occasion for childish sexual innuendoes -- in the case of MSNBC, the same obscene teabag "joke" was repeated 51 times in a 13-minute segment.
So much becomes clear. Of course you'd become a bitter, nasty wingnut who hates everyone and fears the outside world if you can't even understand the simple pleasures of a dick joke. Childish? I prefer the term "childlike" as in "childlike joy and wonder at a world that could produce people who insist that there's nothing funny about teabagging". You shall not make fun of the penis! The more I think about it, the more it makes sense. War-mongering, sperm worshipping, aiming worshipful gazes at Bush's package in his flight suit? What is wingnuttery if not a cult of phallic worship, and every time you make a dick joke, you are blaspheming their god. You are reminding them that the almighty phallus is actually a fleshy, human thing that, like most fleshy, human things, is a ripe occasion for humor. I am no hypocrite on this matter. If I make it through my day without making a vagina-related joke, then my day is poorer for it. For instance, this made me laugh pretty hard.
Of course, the "there is nothing funny about this teabagging" pose is all pose. The joke is only "childish" because they didn't get it, and Johnson* obviously doesn't have any problem with double entendres, because he drops his own in this very post. But it's okay, because double entendres calling someone a gay homosexual sissy boy are okay. It's only not okay when you make fun of the almighty phallus of impenetrable straight men of the wingnut variety.
Andrew Sullivan is giddy; he seems to think the phenomenon is a big ball of fun.
Ha! He's giddy because of the gay. Get it? It's funny because "giddy" is a Girl Emotion, which Sullivan has because he's gay. Also, fun balls. Which isn't a childish dick joke, because it's okay when the target is gay. Then it's extremely mature, because the mark of a mature man who is secure in himself is to go into a full-blown panic when he has to think about people that are different than himself. If you pee yourself in fear when you think about gay men, you're super mature and ready to be the Grand Patriarch.
But if you didn't get Johnson's** joke---entirely possible, because while it's not subtle, we are talking about an audience that had no idea what teabagging means, so not exactly the box of the sharpest pencils around---he's ready to explain Teh Ghey. I don't even know what to say about this, except that it's fucking awesome.
There is something funny going on here, if not exactly where Cooper, Maddow and Sullivan find it. Cooper is widely reputed to be homosexual. Maddow and Sullivan are of course public homosexuals. It is funny in an ironic sort of way that these folks choose to disparage the tea party protesters from somewhere inside the homosexual subculture.
In other words, you may think that Johnson*** and his buddies are hopelessly out of it, because they didn't pick up on the well-worn slang, but in truth, if you know what "teabag" means, it's only because you are a member of the Homosexual Agenda in good standing. Where this logic falls apart is where anyone is supposed to feel bad because Johnson**** called them a homosexual. I kind of like how he's expanded the category "gay" to include everyone who laughed at a teabagging joke, because it's true that we're automatically more fun than this fucknut. But since anyone who got the joke is gay, does that make the homosexual subculture a subculture? Seems like we're the majority, then.
Why not just call the protesters girly boys and let everyone in on the joke? Or would that spoil the fun?
These two sentences really distill the psychological machinations that make a person a wingnut. How dare we not let him in the club that he doesn't want to join because it's morally corrupt? This is the sort of thinking behind most bitterness about liberal elitism. Liberals are awful people that you would presumably want nothing to do with, but how dare they do stuff that leaves you behind?
*Snork.
**Hee.
***Giggle.
****Having this name must be a ball of fun.
