Is Palin Really a Teabagger? |
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| By: EdwardTeller Monday November 2, 2009 1:15 pm | |
The sometimes clever, sometimes obtuse, sometimes dismally clueless people who write Sarah Palin’s material for her have come up with their latest – "Hoffman, Baby, Hoffman!"
Unlike most of her facebook stuff, she may have even actually written that gem.
Over the weekend, I got several emails from people outside of Alaska. Essentially, they asked, "Does Palin really support the Teabaggers?"
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39 Comments
CNN’s Political Ticker was kind enough to post my comment to the article “Biden stumps for Owens, takes dig at Palin”
Hopefully Palin will help Hoffman lose too
I am actually more interested in knowing if Levi Johnston is a teabagger, myself.
I fail to see the winning strategy in insulting the other side in a political debate by labeling them ‘teabaggers’. But, it’s fun for some who don’t get out much.
You are aware that they are the ones who actually used the term about themselves first aren’t you? So we should not use it because it is an insult that they used for themselves?
Sara may be a carpetbagger, a doggie bagger, and needs a head bag, but a tea bagger, I doubt that.
She came down to the lower States for the campaign, and the party gave Her a taste of money, power, and the good life. Alaska didn’t seem quite as great after that.
She is going for the gold coin as fast and hard as she can. I can’t blame Her for that. She has nothing to offer other than name recognition, and Her looks being pleasing to some, and a big mouth. She is the preverbial emty dress, instead of an emty suit. The Republican party is full of emty suits, brains, and ideas so She does fit right in.
The emties are running the Republican party, and She will look like a scholar compared, to some of the other emties.
The label ‘teabagger’ was invented by the Rachel Maddow ‘left’.
I read your comment and now can’t stop laughing way too hard thinking about Levi Johnston and teabagging and what we’ll soon be seeing of him in Playgirl.
=D
Ah, the many meanings of teabagging…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_protests
Tea Party protestors is probably how they would label themselves. That was twisted by Maddow or Air America into ‘Teabagger’ to make a label that is a play on the sex act. Yup, be happy you’re a willing participant in lowest-common-denominator ‘debate world’.
You fail to see the winning strategy? You don’t know what they say about us in Republican circles all the f*cking time, do you? They insult us, denigrate us, mock us, put us down and label us with nonsensical terms on a regular basis. I’m with Grayson in saying “enough is enough.”
So it’s acceptable for liberals to be called every pejorative name in the book but not OK for liberals to return the favor?
Got it.
Enough of what is enough? Enough brain-dead sideshow issues substituting for what we really need to talk about in this country? It’s ineffective to fight fire with fire. Disagree the tea partiers on the issues and provide a compelling argument for your side, rather than by insulting them by labeling them with a sex act. How are Tea Partiers to see the light of reason if they see our side as the one that thinks it wins with crude insults?
Fairleft, I’m sorry if your sensibilities are offended but I’m 57 years old and have spent most of my adult life being mocked on all sides and called names for being a liberal and saying that a lot of things needed to be changed and doing what I could to change them.
I get a chance to return the mockery, you damn skippy I’m going to take advantage of it. If that bothers you, ignore my comments from here on.
You’re insulting all the participants in the Tea Party movement. Is that a good strategy? No problem if you label the blowhard Rush a blowhard, liar and hypocrite, but why insult every Tea Partier by relabeling their movement (or should that be ‘movement’)?
I realize it’s hard (but not impossible) to get your argument through, but the left and progressives shoot in the foot any chance of getting through to those Tea Partiers, probably the majority, who are poorly informed and just need to be reasoned with. Just to get that process started, they need to see that ‘the other side’ (us) have human empathy and respect for them even if we feel their political positions are mostly wrong.
Do you really believe that there is any chance of carrying on a constructive conversation with these people? They’re the same ones who worship at the altar of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.
I’ve tried to have conversations with them. Rational thought is a foreign object. I don’t knwo where you are where you see them as being subject to persuasion but I have seen no evidence of it. Many of these people are the same ones hollering birth certificate birth certificate.
They. Are. Not. Rational.
Edit: And when we have tried to show empathy for their views, what is the result? More mockery of those wimpy libruls bending over for them. Basta!
i hate to say this…. but other than for rush, glenn beck, other elites and self acknowledged racists, i don’t think it’s right or good politics to mock ordinary people who may, for all we know, be suffering genuine economic hardship and have only the glen becks of the world to explain why. imo it’s our job to provide an alternative explanation.
it may feel good and superior to mock, but this is not a game and 1) we need all the allies we can get and 2) if we have no compassion for the suffering of others, then we give liberal and progressive a bad name. this is just organizing 101.
Martin Luther King Would Have Loved the Teabaggers
Immediately below your link to the Palin photo is a little advert saying (on my screen it is, anyway) “KILLER WHITE TEETH”.
my experience is that it takes a long time (not one conversation) and an element of trust. trust that i have to earn. even then, of course, there are no guarantees and failure is more likely than success. but it’s not any harder, probably easier, than getting comfortable cultural liberals to give a shit.
ymmv. but please, don’t make it any harder for me and other progressives willing to make the effort.
Mockery and humor have been used as political weapons for thousands of years of recorded history and probably for hundreds of thousands of years before that. Those on the right are especially good at using mockery in truly misleading and offensive ways to attack their opponents. I’m really not sure I understand what the problem is here.
If the priority is advancing progressive politics, then Dailyhowler perceived the tea-bagging insult correctly from the start:
http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh042009.html
Another real good essay on this matter:
Martin Luther King Would Have Loved the Teabaggers, Not Called Them Racists
http://www.truthout.org/100409B
Yeah fairleft and selise, let’s compromise. It’s working out pretty well so far. Your approach is sure to convince the fairminded folks on the far right. You’ll have them hugging blacks by, erm, well never.
Some of these people think you should be dead. If there were camps, they’d drive the trucks. I don’t see why you’d want to have a nice chat with them. They’d have you killed if they could.
The Alaska Tea Party includes a lot of people I know, especially the branch in my home town, Wasilla. At their first demonstration, at Lake Wasilla, on April 15th, about 20 of their signs had Lipton tea bags attached. Hundreds of tea bags on some of them. I even got some of them on Dennis Zaki’s video and audio, calling THEMSELVES “teabag party” members.
The way teabaggers profess to love Thomas Paine is weird, especially since many of the people raving their support of Paine know nothing about why he felt he had to leave the young USA for Europe – because the recently freed Americans despised his atheism far more than they acknowledged his help. Most Wasilla teagbaggers are devoutly fundamentalist Christians.
The teabaggers’ claim to be a revolutionary movement similar to those who formed the original Boston Tea Party is even more bogus than their false claim to resonance with Tom Paine. The Boston Tea Party protested the biggest corporation then in existence – The East India Company. The current teabagger movement is supported by huge corporations and their policies.
I didn’t know the urban dictionary connotations of”teabagger”when I started using the term. I find it interesting that some who comment at blogs so stridently, complaining about use of the word, do this as strenuously as secretly gay evangelical ministers rail against homosexuality.
Ha! That was a good chuckle.
I think the “tea partiers” used “tea bagging” in relation to their sending tea bags to Congress in protest. A mass “tea bagging”.
http://teabagcongress.com/
http://www.fairtaxblog.com/20060630/its-time-for-a-tea-party-again/ http://www.reteaparty.com/2009/02/27/rick-santelli-is-as-mad-as-hell-chicago-tea-party/
Thus they were “tea baggers”…Maddow just brought to light the fact that the term was a urban slang term for a sexual act.
And I remember laughing hard when she did it!
These teabaggers are not serious interlocutors with whom we can have Socratic-style dialogue.
I could care less about insulting them.
For starters, I have more in common with the people who took action at the Boston Tea Party of 1773 than do these Beckerhead teabaggers, who should be laughed at and dismissed as the teabaggers that they are.
Knoxville,
mockery and humor against the leaders — absolutely. make them look small, mean spirited, weak and stupid. i completely 110% agree.
where we disagree is about the people they have misled. they are our potential allies. we are doing the elite’s business for them when we let tribal identity divide us.
never never never compromise. that is not the point or the goal. not at all.
the goal is to bring those who would be our enemies to their senses, not to the their knees. jeeze, does no one read ghandi in progressive / liberal circles anymore? are we intent on becoming as mean spirited and tribal as the right?
In response to selise @28
Fair enough, but I don’t agree that our goal should be, as you wrote @ 29,
There aren’t enough of them who have any sense, and the best thing to do is mock the entire premise of the misadventure that is teabagging and underscore the fact that it is not a grassroots movement at all.
Some of these folks are just confused, as are many of us, about what the fairly massive cuts in Medicare expenditures mean for them. Believe it or not, a lot of people don’t trust that even a President from the Democratic Party will do right by them. Considering the track record of that party and the stagnant or declining standard of living over the last 35 years for most people in the middle and bottom of this society, I don’t consider that unreasonable.
Some of them are racists, sure, and some are not, just like some progressives are racists, and some are not.
ah, this is where i’m going to challenge you to provide the evidence to back up your claim. iow, are you generalizing / stereotyping or do you have reason and evidence on your side?
mocking them makes them more defensive and angry. it plays into the stereotype of elitist liberal snob. it serves no useful purpose.
if they are a threat to our politics, then it makes sense to take them seriously and think about what are the most productive actions we can take. and i would argue that it is to separate them from the corporatist demagogues who seek to inflame their worst fears and angers.
if they are no threat to our politics, then the least we can do is ignore them. taking delight in mocking their suffering is just cruel. and it represents a kind of tribal politics i abhore.
You’re discounting the power of the irrational in political discourse. I’m not.
I do not mean to side-step your request for evidence, but I need to ask if you have had any really experience in dealing with a typical person who is part of this teabagging. I’ve had extended debates with people who are very much teabaggers and I can assure you that they sincerely believe the mindless shit that has been pounded into their heads for years and that they continue to believe it after you walk them through the illogical of what they’re saying.
As you point out, their leaders use my efforts to use logic to point out the illogic of what they’re saying – my efforts to bring them to their senses, as you put it @ 29 – as proof that I’m just an “elitist liberal snob.”
Yup, they use labels to dismiss me.
Fine, teabagging types suck ****
Hoffman’s election will change nothing in that district and will perpetuate the divide in the Republican party. He is everything one would expect from a Palin devotee, and as a New Yorker, I don’t think this election amounts to much in the big picture except to provide these very strange people a place to put their apparently inexhaustible energy for screaming, dinegrating, judgment and self righteousness. My hope would be that, having bored the rest of us to sleep, they will simply tire themselves out: eventually. No place better to do that than NY23.
hoffman’s election will change a great deal, i predict. the district will suffer by having a rep who doesn’t know how to help his district because he doesn’t live there and doesn’t know much about its needs. nor does he care to.
and he’s not a palin ‘droid, he’s a sworn-in-writing dreck (oops, sorry..) beck ‘droid.
i have positied elsewhere that these tea-party fools will eventually be too weak to crawl to the polls, but that will take time.
being a big mark mothersbaugh fan, i will say that i find the ‘devo-tee’ concept being applied to hoffman rich with meaning.
sorry for the spelling error….
p-o-s-i-t-e-d. posited.
we live. we learn.
Yeah, but if the people district felt that strongly that they would be harmed by this guy’s ineptitude, they would leave their computers, their tvs or use their lunch break to vote. They have access to this information So if this is what they choose, well, that’s Democracy. For me to comment on what they do or do not do for themselves is not my place. But suffice it to say, I won’t be hanging out it NY23 anytime soon.
It looks like Hoffman really knows nothing about his district and how to represent it, but, ahem, tea partiers (now I’m told that calling these folks teabaggers is rude) don’t seem to care if their elected reps know anything at all, as long as they are spinning them some magical fantasy that they want to see & hear. Witness the success of Sarah Palin who ran for Pres on the GOP ticket last year (and I do mean: Pres. That’s why the tea partiers voted for HER, not for McCain).
So I’m sort of in the mood to see Hoffman win and then not represent the district well. Let these folks experience tea parties to their fullest and see if they can live on it, love it and like it.
As to being rude to tea partiers – or not – well, I’m of the opinion that it doesn’t really matter. Most of my family are teabaggers; they are very well educated; very well traveled; but believe me, there is NO room for ANY discussion whatsoever. Simply put: they do NOT want to hear another point of view, even if said POV deviates only slightly from their belief system.
I think we need Cult de-programmer people (such as what families sometimes hire to de-program their relatives who got into a cult) to work with the tea partiers. I would dearly love to believe otherwise, but that’s how I see it. I know quite a few teabaggers – there simply is NO way to talk to them.
And yes, some are really hurting, but many are just selfish and don’t want to share or pay any taxes ever for any reason. But then they all have their hands out for help when they need the PD or the fire dept or whatever. They look to their “leaders,” including the church to tell them that it’s fine and good to be narcissistic, self-absorbed, selfish children. and see: it’s working!
Maybe they’ll become the Tea Party Party.