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{{bronze}}[[image:TEAbaggers_in_Bloomington_IL.jpg|thumb|A lot of angry people who didn't notice the national debt going up since the early 1980s.]]
 
{{bronze}}[[image:TEAbaggers_in_Bloomington_IL.jpg|thumb|A lot of angry people who didn't notice the national debt going up since the early 1980s.]]
 
[[image:TEAbagging_in_Boston_MA.jpg|thumb|More people, exercising their right to appear ignorant of history in public.]]
 
[[image:TEAbagging_in_Boston_MA.jpg|thumb|More people, exercising their right to appear ignorant of history in public.]]
:''Were you looking for [[Teabagging]]? (As if RW's Human Sexuality <s>manual</s> category needed any more expansion!'')
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:''This article is about in-your-face [[wingnut|nuts]]. For [[testicles|nuts]] in your face, see [[Teabagging]].''
  
 
The '''Tea Party movement''', more appropriately known as the "Teabagging Movement", is a loosely organized, and even more loosely platformed group of mostly middle-aged, white, [[tax protest]]ers, inspired by a complete misinterpretation of the [[Boston Tea Party]], and managed, reported on, and supported by [[Fox News]] and their various loony anchors.  It was seen as a unique, and <s>probably short-lived</s> corporate-maintained phenomenon spawned a week or so before, and ending on, April 15th, 2009, the day income tax forms were due in the [[United States]].   
 
The '''Tea Party movement''', more appropriately known as the "Teabagging Movement", is a loosely organized, and even more loosely platformed group of mostly middle-aged, white, [[tax protest]]ers, inspired by a complete misinterpretation of the [[Boston Tea Party]], and managed, reported on, and supported by [[Fox News]] and their various loony anchors.  It was seen as a unique, and <s>probably short-lived</s> corporate-maintained phenomenon spawned a week or so before, and ending on, April 15th, 2009, the day income tax forms were due in the [[United States]].   

Revision as of 02:40, 15 September 2010

A lot of angry people who didn't notice the national debt going up since the early 1980s.
File:TEAbagging in Boston MA.jpg
More people, exercising their right to appear ignorant of history in public.
This article is about in-your-face nuts. For nuts in your face, see Teabagging.

The Tea Party movement, more appropriately known as the "Teabagging Movement", is a loosely organized, and even more loosely platformed group of mostly middle-aged, white, tax protesters, inspired by a complete misinterpretation of the Boston Tea Party, and managed, reported on, and supported by Fox News and their various loony anchors. It was seen as a unique, and probably short-lived corporate-maintained phenomenon spawned a week or so before, and ending on, April 15th, 2009, the day income tax forms were due in the United States.

Since that time, teabaggers (they hate this name, which they came up with, before they realized what else it meant) have protested many other issues, such as the attempt to provide many of them with affordable health care. Millions Hundreds of people gathered at various locations around the country to throw teabags into some handy body of water to protest taxes government debt Obama Hitler health care reform big government tea taxes, presumably with representation.[1]

The "movement" has adopted the lame slogan "Taxed Enough Already" as a backronym for "tea".[2] The only fear sane Americans have is that it won't become a "call to arms".[3]

There were apparently follow-up protests on the 4th of July, 2009, however, they received such little media coverage, and only one place cared.[4] They did, however, hold a larger protest in Washington, D.C. on September 12, 2009 with attendance of about 70,000, comparable to other major D.C. protests.[5]

The teabagging movement represents a great achievement of the corporate propaganda system. Using people's anger towards the system and their deep-rooted racism to get them to actively root against their own self-interest is simply a milestone. By also getting this self-inflected gunshot wound repeatedly broadcast at their news outlets takes a lot of...well...balls.

As the 2010 US mid-term elections approach, there is a lot of hype over whether or not the teabaggers are managing to push their (mostly) insane candidates forward through the primaries and into the general elections.

Organization

The origins of these teabaggings depends on who you ask. Right wingers insist that this movement is a totally organic, grassroots effort that sprung up overnight. Liberals Everyone else realizes this is a media stunt astroturfed by the likes of Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, Koch Industries, Inc., and Fox News[6]. These demonstrations took place everywhere from Kentucky to California, but were thwarted in Washington, D.C. because they didn’t have a permit to dump a million tea bags into the sea[7] (way to organize, guys!).

More than $850,000 of the money the supposedly grassroots political action committee collected went to the firm of GOP political operatives who ran it.[8]

More simply put, the "organization" consists of some printed paper yanking on a short string, to which is attached a tissue paper bag full of jumbled shredded leaves, which are steeped by soaking them in boiling water.

Factions

By the end of 2009, various groups had formed claiming to be the leaders of the tea-party movement, including the Tea Party Patriots and the Tea Party Nation.[9][10] On February 4-6 , 2010 the Tea Party Nation hosted the first ever national convention in Nashville, Tennessee with guest speaker Sarah Palin.[11] The convention was attacked by teabaggers for being distant from the supposedly grassroots movement, with tickets costing $549.[12]

The largest tea party organizations by size are:[13]

  • Tea Party Patriots
  • ResistNet
  • Tea Party Nation
  • FreedomWorks Tea Party
  • 1776 Tea Party[14]

Ensuring Liberty Corporation

At the First Teabagging Convention, Mark Scoda, a Memphis businessman, announced the creation of Ensuring Liberty Corporation, a Memphis based company with a political action group that would fund "Tea Party candidates" - that is, politicians supportive of the tea party movement which he described as: "Less government, fiscal responsibility, lower taxes, states rights, and national security." It will be accepting corporate donations.[15]

Stupidity

No matter what the lefties say, race has NOTHING at all to do with the teabagger movement. Silly ofay can't even spell homie right.

The problems with these teabagging protests are many, but boil down to rich right-wingers taking advantage of uninformed working stiffs. Generally, these protests suffer at least one of these flaws:

  1. The Obama administration had issued no new taxes at all, before the date of the protest. Any complaint about the tax policy at the time should be directed at the Bush administration, whose taxes were still in effect. Even after the Obama administration changed the tax laws for the following year, 95% of people will get a tax cut, not an increase. No reports exist saying whether the protests consisted entirely of the 5% who would pay (slightly) more taxes. Furthermore, though the Teabaggers frequently protest the 2009 stimulus package, tax cuts encompassed 37% of the stimulus.
  2. The original Tea Party was to protest taxation without representation. The US currently has taxation with representation, unless Obama plans to suspend free elections (he doesn’t). Thus, using tea is an inappropriate, idiotic idea that accomplishes nothing except pointing out which people are not clever enough to research what they are protesting about. Oh, and giving some fish a brief caffeine and tannin high. And creating a temporary windfall in sales of tea bags.
  3. Also, and more amusingly, the original Tea party was a protest over the tea tariff being cut — but only for the British East India Company, giving them a virtual monopoly due to lower pricing over the wealthy merchants who were being undercut — the "protesters".
  4. Promoted as a "giant" protest, with "over 500" local events, it is utterly dwarfed by the "protest heard 'round the world" against the start of the Iraq War, which earned George W. Bush the ignominious title of having the largest number of people ever in history to protest against him.
  5. Many who consider themselves to be part of the Tea Party worship the Republican Party and/or people like Glenn Beck. Others (wanting to appear "independent") claim to not agree with such organizations or people, yet espouse much of the same crackpot rhetoric. They think that listening to paranoid blowhard Alex Jones and reading infowars makes them savvy.

9/12 protests

The protests on the September 12, 2009, were the accumulation of a six month campaign by Fox News host Glenn Beck. The 9/12 Project gets its name from the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington DC, on September 11, 2001. Apparently Beck decided that the way to commemorate the 8th anniversary of this event was to hold a large anti-government rally in one of the cities it occurred, something he had failed to do on the previous seven anniversaries whilst George W Bush was president. His rationale was that the protest was going to take America back to how they felt the day after the terrorist attacks - united behind a Republican president.[16] He then devised 9 principles and 12 values he wanted everyone to adhere to.[17] When the protest finally occurred it was given all day coverage on Fox News, with Glen Beck hosting a special show from the protest. Despite some claims of a seven-figure turnout,[18] the heavily astroturfed tea party protest attracted 70,000 to 100,000 people.[5]

Aftermath

The aftermath of the protest became a comedy of its own. Fox News began running full page ads in newspapers that read "How did, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and CNN miss this story?"[19] The other news organisations all pointed out that they had given coverage to the protest during their news bulletins. Fox countered by saying they were missing the story behind the protest, however the story behind the protest is that Fox News astroturfed the protest - including having news producers directing and rallying the crowd.[20]

Never one to be outdone, Rush Limbaugh suggested protesting the media itself for not covering this "growing movement".[21] This began WorldNetDaily's attempted astroturf campaign to protest "Obama's Minion Media", with the help of the supposedly grassroots, supposed organisation Operation: can you hear us now? - whose website seems not to exist.[22] The extremely lacklustre event gathered less than a few thousand people in more than 100 locations, making for underwhelming protests that were justifiably ignored by the media.[23] As with the July 4th protests, unless the tea parties have extensive coverage from major media outlets, such as Fox News, before hand, they tend to attract very small crowds.

In October 2009, Republicans in the House of Representatives wanted to pass a resolution to commemorate the "hundreds of thousands of American patriots" who "came to Washington, DC, to show their disapproval."[24] Remember, these protests are not organised by the Republicans, they are entirely organic, and the protesters oppose government waste, such as passing unnecessary resolutions.

Assault on language

As if any confirmation were needed, the fact that the protest has been labeled "teabagging" shows that it was created by a bunch of old white people who had no idea of its more popular meaning. Many in the gay community feel that the teabagging party has tarnished the name of the dirty homosexual act.

In a further proof that the tea party movement thinks Google is some sort of a communist ploy, an Oregon tea party group had bumper stickers saying "We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us."[25] Some protesters have been seen carrying signs that say "LOL" (with Obama campaign logo as O). While Internet language is always evolving, we assume the response from 4chan is probably something along the lines of "ಠ_ಠ".

Insert teabagging jokes here

  • Protestors were "full throated" and wanted to give Obama "tongue lashings". Oh yeah, that's dirty baby.[26]
  • A Fox News fan wrote in saying he would hang tea bags from his rear-view mirror and antennae (to "support the cause") because he couldn't make it to the actual protests and Gretchen Carlson piped in saying, "You could hang it from your mirror too like fuzzy dice."[27]
  • "It's hard to talk when you're teabagging"[28]
  • "(I)f you are planning simultaneous tea bagging all around the country, you're going to need a Dick Armey." [29]
  • "Teabaggers suck balls."

Not a joke

"But they are nothing new, nothing new at all. They are mostly a bunch of cranky white men with money who are trying desperately to hang on to their privileges. Same as it ever was.
They are what we have called "Republicans" for at least the last 30 years.
" [30]

There were 1.7 million 'baggers at a protest in Washington D.C. in the autumn of 2009.[31] Not 60-75 thousand as estimated by the DC Park Policiffers.

Conflict with Libertarians

Though the movement claims to be libertarian, many libertarians have come out against the movement [32]and its prominent figures[33]. A Libertarian Party poll has also shown that Libertarians see the Teabaggers as too "Republican-flavored."[34] Some of their possible "problems" with the Tea Party could be:

See Also

Tea Party Organizers

External links

Footnotes

  1. To be fair, these idiots don't feel they are "represented", since most of the people they voted for in November 2008 lost. Most of the world celebrated the United States' imminent entry into the 20th century (one step at a time, OK?).
  2. teapartyday.com, a TEA protest website
  3. Really, this might not be such a bad thing. This crowd can hardly walk without a rascal scooter, their chances of waging a successful insurgency are zero. Despite what they might think, they'd be gunned down by Big Brother's Socialist Blackshirt Gestapo within a few days.
  4. Some guy whining about media coverage.
  5. 5.0 5.1 Size Matters; So do lies - fivethirtyeight.com
  6. http://who.godaddy.com/WhoIsVerify.aspx?domain=chicagoteaparty.com&prog_id=godaddy
  7. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30227452/
  8. Alternet
  9. Tea Party Patriots' website
  10. Tea Party Nation's website
  11. National Tea Party Convention website
  12. Tea Party Disputes Take Toll on Convention - New York Times January 25, 2010
  13. The Death of the Tea Parties? Not So Fast... - Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights.
  14. Website. A particularly lulz worthy group due to the fact the Boston Tea Party occurred in 1773.
  15. Tea Party Leader Launches Political Outfit - Wall Street Journal Blogs. February 5, 2010.
  16. 9/12 Project mission statement
  17. 9 principles, 12 values
  18. A million or more rock Washington - WorldNetDaily. September 12, 2009.
  19. Fox News Newspaper Ad Makes False Claims About Tea Party Coverage - Huffington Post. September 18, 2009.
  20. Fox News Producer Caught Rallying 9/12 Protest Crowd In Behind-The-Scenes Video - Huffington Post. September 19, 2009.
  21. Patriots' newest target: Obama 'Minion Media' - WorldNetDaily. September 16, 2009.
  22. Obama's 'Minion Media' to face fed-up Americans - WorldNetDaily. September 28, 2009.
  23. Protesters target media: 'Can you hear us now?' - WorldNetDaily. October 17, 2009.
  24. House Republicans Commemorate 9/12 March With House Resolution - Huffington Post. October 27, 2009.
  25. Oregon political movement adopts a 4chan slogan
  26. Biased as all hell from MSNBC, but the introductory commentary says it all
  27. Huffington post vidcap of Fox News
  28. Anderson Cooper adds one more stupid joke.
  29. Shuster, quoted at the Huffington Post
  30. Hullabaloo: Teabag Nation.
  31. Glenn Beck: measured by the University of I Don't Remember.
  32. How to undermine a movement - NolanChart.com. Feb 7, 2010
  33. Glen Beck and Ron Paul - Fool me Once - NolanChart.com. April 12, 2009
  34. Which choice best represents your position on Libertarians and the Tea Parties? - LP.org. April 12, 2010