Thursday, January 21, 2010

Who First used the term 'TEABAGGER'?

The modern day Teabaggers has its start with Wall Street reporter Rick Santelli going on a rant on the floor of the exchange about the 'Sub Prime' mortgage holders buying houses they couldn't afford with only $500. down and then "expecting tax payers to pay for the cost of adding on a bathroom". I remember watching it live at the time and thinking what a lunatic he was blaming the victims of Predatory Lending practices and the current foreclosure crisis.

To whoops and applause from traders on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Santelli argued that President Obama's bill aimed at reducing foreclosures would force fiscally responsible Americans to bail out people who bought more house than they could afford. "We're thinking of having a Chicago tea party in July," Santelli added.



But he did strike a nerve and the Conservative fringe on the Right responded with their own brand of activism mimicking the Boston Tea Party which was a directed by colonists in Boston, a town in the British colony of Massachusetts against the British government.

On December 16, 1773, after officials in Boston refused to return three shiploads of taxed tea to Britain, a group of colonists boarded the ships and destroyed the tea by throwing it into Boston Harbor. The incident remains an iconic event of American history, and reference is often made to it in other political protests.

The current Tea Party movement initially came up with the 'clever' idea of sending Tea bags to members of Congress. It was in their initial rallys that they started referring to this act of sending their representatives boxes of tea bags as 'TEABAGGING":

Now this may be a generational thing but somebody should have told these people that the term was already in wide use as a term for performing oral sex on a man. Now you got people like Tucker Carlson crying: "Stop saying Teabagger". I got news for all of you Teabaggers that are opposed to the use of the word Teabagging when they are out doing their Teabagging protest; You really shot yourself in the foot (or other appendage) when you started this mess. But then what do you expect from the extremist that our on a highly successful mission to divide and destroy the once Grand Old Party, GOP. Oh yeah, and they really didn't mean to destroy the country their supposed to be saving either. Collateral Damage its called!


Max Blumenthal covered the 9.12.09 anti-Obama rally on the National Mall, where tens of thousands of teabaggers demonstrated their opposition to healthcare reform by calling Obama the biggest Nazi in the world, claiming he wants to put "real" Americans in concentration camps, and was born in Kenya. But how many of them have health insurance, and do they know they're pawns in the game of healthcare industry front man Dick Armey? Of course not.





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Dale Robertson, the man who claims to be the "President and Founder of the Tea Party" (is he the one who didn't check Google before describing them as "teabaggers?") is shown in this picture from Gawker wearing a "Man of Faith" hat while carrying a hand-lettered sign that includes the N-word (misspelled, no less).
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