Read Jay Nordlinger’s “Rise of an Epithet,” wherein he describes how the term “teabagger” was originally, if innocently, employed by tea party activists, and also expresses disappointment with the liberal media for perpetuating the term and demonstrating the sort of glee Rachel Maddow displays here. But what I cannot figure out is how, innocent mistake or not, the small-government-preferrers came to the term “teabag” in the first place. Isn’t the teabag–in the non-scrotal sense–a relatively recent invention, post-dating the Boston Tea Party by a number of decades? Is “teabagger” meant to riff on the idea of “carpetbagger” somehow? What am I missing?
December 30, 2009
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I thought that some of them had called themselves “teabaggers” because one of their first organized acts was mailing a bag of tea to their elected reps as a notice of disgust with policies in place. see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_protests#.22Teabagging.22_controversy
Comment by FelixP — January 6, 2010 @ 4:40 pm