You Mean, Heterosexuals Do That Too?
Scott Johnson holds forth on teabagging and “public homosexuality“:
The star hosts of CNN and MSNBC news shows have notoriously derided the tea party demonstrations around the country with reference to the practice of teabagging (which I had never heard of before they brought it up). 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.
[...]
While sitting in for Keith Olbermann on April 15, MSNBC’s David Shuster packed the teabagging puns into his report on the protests. Shuster is like a juvenile student who has commandeered the loudspeaker system at his high school to commit the prank of a lifetime. Maybe it was just a case of Olbermann’s writers feeding Shuster the same good stuff they usually give to Olbermann.Andrew Sullivan is giddy; he seems to think the phenomenon is a big ball of fun.
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 protestors from somewhere inside the homosexual subculture. Why not just call the protestors girly boys and let everyone in on the joke? Or would that spoil the fun?
There is not only something funny going on here, there is a story here. These supposed journalists and their networks (or publisher, in Sullivan’s case) have rather seriously insulted the citizens who colorfully took to the streets to air respectable views in a most civil fashion. If they had any decency, Cooper et al. would apologize for their vile reference to sexual practices in the context of ordinary citizens exercising their First Amendment rights.
Skip a beat….
UPDATE: I had missed Matt Taibbi’s vulgar assault on Michelle Malkin in this context drawing on the heterosexual form of the practice.
The heterosexual form of the practice. Scott, who is reputed to be heterosexual a public heterosexual, thinks that oral sex is some weird, kinky sex practice that only homosexuals do, except someone just slipped him a note to let him know there is a “heterosexual form” of this practice.
Scott, you are an ignorant, homophobic fool.
Oh, wait. That’s not a story, either.
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KATHY KATTENBURG intentionally misses the point. By the latest count, over a half million people showed at around 800 Tea parties throughout urban and rural America. That's a lot of people, especially for a workday, in among a population that works for a living. And this movement is just a couple months old.
What's the left's response? Well, lefties cannot argue against the proposition that an Obama-proposed level of national debt will be ruinous to this country, so they don't try. So far, they have tried 2 tacks:
1) Lying, i.e., making statements the speaker knows to be false, e.g., that the Tea Party protests were “astroturf,” a charge that applies to International ANSWER, Code Pink, and other fake demonstrations on the Left, but does not apply to this ultra-decentralized event.
2) Making a lot of what they apparently thought were brilliantly clever references to sucking balls. (And, in doing so, failing to reach the level of wit reached by Eric Cartman.)
Which constitutes pretty convincing evidence that those opposing the Tea Parties, and what the parties represent, are dishonest and not-too-bright hacks.
Which means that in the long run, and likely in the medium-run (watch the 2010 elections), the hacks will lose and the Tea Partyers will win.
(And winning doesn't mean electing Republicans. It means electing representatives that will stop the generational theft. See this CNN story: “GOP congressman booed mercilessly at Tea Party rally”: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/04/18… )
I haven't gone to any of these tea parties and I don't necessarily agree with them. But people ought to be able to engage in such peaceful protest without the supposed heirs of Murrow and Cronkite making such smarmy jokes at their expense. A sad day for American journalism.
That term used in this context is not merely offensive but stupid, smug and self-defeating.
I thought the snickering and juvenile behavior from the much of the press was unprofessional and a bigger problem than Scott Johnston's comments.
KATHY KATTENBURG intentionally misses the point. By the latest count, over a half million people showed at around 800 Tea parties throughout urban and rural America. That's a lot of people, especially for a workday, in among a population that works for a living. And this movement is just a couple months old.
What's the left's response? Well, lefties cannot argue against the proposition that an Obama-proposed level of national debt will be ruinous to this country, so they don't try.
Hmmm.. Since when did the right pay attention to protests? Especially since they missed this one (among many, many others):
The February 15, 2003 anti-war protest was a coordinated day of protests across the world against the imminent invasion of Iraq. Millions of people protested in approximately 800 cities around the world. According to BBC News, between six and ten million people took part in protests in up to sixty countries over the weekend of the 15th and 16th; other estimates range from eight million to thirty million.
By kryon77's logic, we shouldn't have fought the Iraq war. I'm sure he'd disagree with me, though.
The larger point is that most people at the “tea parties” are old and/or square and had no idea what teabagging is. The largest point is that it's a hoot to make jokes at their expense because of this. Particularly since most of them, like Scott Johnson, would be offended by such a practice.
@skylights: I hadn't realized, I guess, that 'having a hoot' at the expense of the subjects of a story was part of journalism. So glad that you feel that it's your place to assess the prudishness of Scott Johnson, too- what happened to people minding their own business?
@Kathy- I thought it was a little odd that he brought up the homosexual connection but I think it was probably due to the fact that most young people that I questioned about the term said it's used among guys constantly as a prejorative to describe the other guy as gay (“What a teabagger” taking the place of older prejorative terms for being a male homosexual.)
It's quaint and all that there's some sort of authority being given to the “Urban Dictionary” as though it's the equivalent of the New Oxford unabridged dictionary, but the funny thing about slang terms is that they have a life of their own and their defined by the subgroups of culture who use them.
CS: Skylights was being ironic, trying to insult those who insult the old and prudish (why would someone insult people just for being old and prudish?) I am both old and prudish, and reading Skylights as ironic, I took no offense. Ms. Kattenberg's “ignorant, homophobic,” on the other hand, is not intended ironically. “Ignorant” might seem a little unfair to me as someone who also would not have known what tea bagging meant (and, by the way, do the tea partiers call themselves “tea baggers,” or was that term made up by onlooking sniggerers?), but it's an apparently statement of literal fact, and I know that I and many others are indeed ignorant of many things (life is too short to learn everything). “Homophobic,” I take no offense at since it was not aimed at me, and I don't know enough about Mr. Johnson (something else I'm ignorant about) to have an opinion of the fairness of the insult as addressed to him.
CiarandDenlane: On second reading of skylight's comment, you're probably right about the irony. Sadly, I read so many similar statements that are made without a hint of it that I read it straight instead of looking for that twist on it.
They called themselves teabaggers first. I guess “tea party” looked too sissy so they went for teabagging completely unaware of it's meaning.
This is a feb 2009 picture of one protest
http://norwegianity.files.wordpress.com/2009/02…