04.10.09
That pesky ‘teabag’ issue
I’m sure you’ve heard about the “teabag” parties, at least if you are an American. For those of you who aren’t, or haven’t been paying attention to movement on the fringes, what happened is that Rick Santelli, a derivatives trader who plays a business reporter on television, staged a little stunt during his CNBC business show trying to prove that Americans think that everybody but investment bankers and traders is a loser who deserves to lose their homes. The fact that he had a few other traders agree with him vocally meant that it was time to start a movement.
Notwithstanding the fact that people who report on the news are not supposed to be using their position to make the news—or start political movements, for that matter—he got involved with a website that apparently had previously been set up just for this and ran with the “tea party” concept.
Again, for those of you who are not familiar with the concept, prior to the start of the American Revolution, a small group of colonists attacked a ship in Boston Harbor and dumped its load of tea overboard as a sign of their refusal to endure “taxation without representation”. The issue was that the King had put heavy taxes on many things to cover the expenses of financial mismanagement of government back home, and somebody had to cover the costs. This is now known as the “Boston Tea Party”.
Right after Santelli’s rant, there were a few gatherings called “tea parties” around the country, though attendance was rather spotty. Some only had a few dozen attendees. There were a few where the size of the crowd was claimed to be in the thousands, but official estimates (by public authorities) put it significantly lower. So altogether nationwide it didn’t total the attendance at one typical Obama rally.
The thing is, even among right wingnuts, there isn’t that much enthusiasm for raising taxes for the poor so that rich people can keep more of their money. They have to keep the issue abstract and hope that their supporters don’t start calculating how much money they have lost in real wages and buying power in the last 8 years.
Example:
I answered a question on Yahoo Answers a week or so ago, written by someone who claimed to be in the bracket where he would be paying more taxes, but thought that he and his wife ought to be able to keep their money because “they work hard”.
I answered that if he’s making $250K he should be able to afford to pay the extra few dollars a day, and everybody works hard. The guy sent me an email complaining about how he has paid $70,000 for special schools and rehabilitation services for his autistic child. I was like, “Whoa, you’re complaining to the wrong person. I think the government ought to pay all of that, whether a person is rich or poor.”
He didn’t respond.
So many of the people who show up at these “parties” have some other agenda. They may be “birthers” who believe that Obama was born elsewhere and therefore can’t be President. They may be opposed to abortion rights. They may be anti-immigrant, anti-welfare, anti-civil rights. Or they may be just plain nuts.
The “parties” are all organized from the top down to try to generate the appearance of populist sentiment. That’s about all that Republicans seem to be able to do nowadays, and it’s not working out all that well. Fox News is pushing these parties hard to try to get people to attend. So is the Huffington Post, which is looking for “citizen reporters” to upload videos and write stories about their local parties. So it is not impossible that many of the parties will be attended by mostly moles.
At this link you will find several videos recorded at the last round of tea parties. I don’t want to put them all in here, so I’ll just give you one.
By now of course Rick Santelli has found that he was losing credibility by being associated with this “movement” and has dissociated himself from it.
But anyway, the big “teabagging” issue is how they thought they could squeak that name by. While many people involved in the parties do not seem to have been aware of what the term also means, it seems like at least some of them thought they could use the sexual allusion to their heart’s content and not have it turned against them. Or at least not for comedy.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say “teabagging”, you will by the time you have watched both these videos.
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