Teabaggers’ Outrage over Innuendo Makes Their Cluelessness Even More Laughable

At some point on April 15, the day of the teabagging protests, rank and file Republicans who supported the movement, including some of the estimated 250,000 people who attended the meetings nationwide, were finally clued in to the fact that “teabagging” was a frat-boy double entendre for a sex act.

The moment of realization may have come that morning when party boss Rush Limbaugh informed his audience that “teabagging” had a second meaning that he couldn’t divulge on his “family program.” He encouraged them not to think about the unfortunate branding and its likely fatal consequences for their nascent movement but rather to “think of steeping” tea bags instead.

Observers of the tea bag movement had known about the double meaning for months, and as the day of the event approached, mockery of it in certain quarters — okay, on MSNBC — provided some much-needed comedic relief related to economic news after months of nothing but doom and gloom.

Here’s David Shuster, sitting in for Keith Olbermann, on MSNBC, on April 13:

It‘s going to be teabagging day for the right-wing and they‘re going nuts for it. Thousands of them whipped out the festivities early this past weekend, and while the parties are officially toothless, the teabaggers are full-throated about their goals.

They want to give President Obama a strong tongue-lashing and lick government spending — spending they did not oppose when they were under presidents Bush and Reagan. They oppose Mr. Obama‘s tax rates — which will be lower for most of them — and they oppose the tax increases Mr. Obama is imposing on the rich, whose taxes will skyrocket to a rate about 10 percent less than it was under Reagan. That‘s teabagging in a nut shell.

That it took so long for the teabaggers to realize their movement was being mocked just underscores their cluelessness.

On teabagging day — at the very moment it was too late to fix the problem — the GOP establishment sent its messagemeisters onto Fox News to try to shift blame for their own inept brand management onto the satirists who were mocking them:

Brent Bozell, president of the conservative Media Research Center, said the media coverage was “insulting” …

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Bozell said. “The oral sex jokes on (CNN) and particularly MSNBC on teabagging … they had them by the dozens. That’s how insulting they were toward people who believe they’re being taxed too highly.”

Max Pappas, public policy vice president at FreedomWorks — a small-government group which promoted the tea parties — said it’s a “shame” media outlets cracked jokes at a genuine “grassroots uprising.”

“I think what that reveals is how worried they are that this might actually be something serious. You make fun of things you’re afraid of, I’d say,” Pappas said.

On Fox’s morning show, Seton Motley, yet another spokesman for the right-wing Media Research Center, echoed his boss Brent Bozell’s outrage:

“Since they can’t get any more bias, they decided to be vulgar instead.”

Of course, Bozell’s group was silent when Boss Limbaugh made vulgar references to the relationship between British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Pres. Obama:

LIMBAUGH: “So here is a full-fledged, committed global socialist praising the president of the United States for all of his achievements in the first 70 days — a global socialist happy with the changes Obama has made, and ‘you have changed America’s relationship with the world,’ which is why all of the losers that make up the protesters are breaking bank windows,” Limbaugh said. “But the slobbering, the slobbering – this guy, folks I’m telling you – if he keeps this up throughout the G20, Gordon Brown will come down with anal poisoning and may die from it.”

The right was also silent when Limbaugh made a similar vulgar comment about the friendship between Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who is 54 and has never been married:

Limbaugh was ranting against Sen. John McCain on his radio show this week when a caller asked whether he thought McCain would pick Sen. Lindsey Graham as his running mate. Limbaugh doubted it, though he admitted: “I may be wrong … Lindsey Graham is certainly close enough to [McCain] to die of anal poisoning.”

Even without the double entendre, the teabagging movement was ripe for mockery from the outset. It got its impetus among libertarians after CNBC’s Rick Santelli delivered his impromptu rant about the economy in which he decried bailing out the mortgages of regular Americans, but said not a peep about bailing out the banks and mortgage lenders who made the bad loans.

As the momentum picked up, the GOP’s DC fatcats sensed an opportunity, shoved the libertarians aside and hurried out to lead the parade. They quickly covered over the movement’s grass roots with astroturf by bringing in their corporate lobbyists and engaging Fox News, the party’s official propaganda outlet, to do “publicity and P.R” for the event. (During its coverage on April 15, the rallies were labeled “FNC Tax Day Tea Parties” at the bottom of Fox’s screen all day.)

If the right had competent leaders, the “tea bag” brand would have been vetted early on — we have to assume the guys who run the GOP and FOX were familiar with the term — and corrective action could have been taken before the day of the event. That didn’t happen, and it’s hard to see now how the movement can ever live it down.

Even without the fatal branding, the movement’s prospects were bleak. The problem with astroturf is that while it may look like nice on television, it cannot grow.

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