It simply identifies them as out of touch with American culture, what’s going on with our language, and our values, over the past half-century or more. They might as well hang signs around their necks: “Clueless, addled, self-righteous idiot imposing my narrow values on others.”
I’ve often wondered who thought “MoveOn” was a good name for an activist group- to me, it suggests an organisation devoted to telling people to stop caring about unimportant issues (ie, “Move on and find something more worthwhile to devote your energies to”), not… whatever it is they actually do.
And whenever I hear the term “Teabagging”, I think of immature (typically teenage) online FPS gamers… it’s certainly not a term I’d associate with any credible political movement.
Having said that, I agree with the posters who have said the political sorts describing themselves as “Teabaggers” would have no idea at all of the sex act/online gaming connotations of the term.
Somehow I doubt they’d care, instead saying that it was proof of how far society had fallen or something equally silly…
I think it was coined for people to move on after the Bush/Gore fiasco and start working on returning Democrats to power.
No, it was named in reaction to the Clinton impeachment.
From their website:
MoveOn.org Civic Action was started by Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Although neither had experience in politics, they shared deep frustration with the partisan warfare in Washington D.C. and the ridiculous waste of our nation’s focus at the time of the impeachment mess. On September 18th 1998, they launched an online petition to “Censure President Clinton and Move On to Pressing Issues Facing the Nation.” Within days they had hundreds of thousands of individuals signed up, and began looking for ways these voices could be heard.
:eek:
Political neutral here – well as far as US politics goes – was this just a case of a particular person (wiki says Fox News reporter Griff Jenkins) inadvisedly using a word that had another meaning, and then opponents not letting it die? Or have the supporters claimed the term as their own? With or without realizing its other – and with respect to Hilarity N. Suze – older meaning.
But I’m still left wondering: why teabag? I get the Boston Tea Party allusion, but teabags post date that by 130 odd years.
That explains a bit, but now that issue is no longer relevant, their name does seem a bit… ill-fitting, for want of a better term.
I think one of the first protests that the group organized was to encourage like-minded people to mail teabags in attached to their tax returns as a symbolic gesture.
Do you know who ELSE enjoyed teabagging? :eek:
It seems like the teabagging jokes started up as soon as the protests did. I’m a little surprised there’s still people saying, “Hey, did anyone else notice that name sounds dirty?”.
The truth is, if it didn’t sound dirty, we wouldn’t be calling them that. Yes, there were protests that involved sending teabags to Obama and Congress, but there wasn’t widespread use of the word teabag as a verb to describe those protests.
Instead, there were a few websites and a few misguided people with signs saying things “teabag Obama before he teabags you”. So liberal commentator latched on to this because they saw an easy joke. The whole thing blew up and the name stuck.
Well, of course. If they’re just going to hand us the pies, we might as well throw them.
No dammit, we’re DEMOCRATS!
We have to work to get along.
We have to put our efforts into losing!
OK, thank you, that makes a bit more sense to me now.
The original idea of throwing rocks at British people didn’t clear legal.
Crimeny, I hope Big T never finds out about what “Santorum” means.
It occurs to me to wonder if some of those folks in the opposition might take exception to the First Lady’s vegetable garden project. Maybe on the grounds that it looks like she’s trying to be all holier-than-thou with her home-grown salad fixin’s and her healthy lifestyle choices.
The could start a movement of bringing salad greens to Mrs. Obama’s public appearances, and making a big show of tossing them out.
And I know just the perfect name for them…
I’m not sure where I read it, but someone was talking about gathering the collected works of Marx, and having a bon fire. The tentative name would be the Hot Karls.
As a protest of illegal immigration, someone planned to take a bunch of mud…no sorry, I can’t go through with it.