If the Bag Fits

If there's one thing teabaggers are very good at, it's getting offended. They can pour out personal abuse and name-calling by the bucketful ("Obambi," "Odumbo," "Obozo," "Obowma," etc) but say one thing about them and they carry on like a five-year-old girl whose pigtails have just been pulled.

Case in point is the "teabagger" name itself. The tea-party movement came up with it early last year, right after Obama became president, and it became very popular very quickly. It was everywhere, showing up in such forms as "Tea Bag Liberal Dems Before They Tea Bag You" and "Teabagging 4 Jesus," among others. One protester in Washington even threw a box of tea bags over the White House fence, much to the consternation of the Secret Service.

All that was before someone in the movement learned how to use Google and discovered the term's other meaning. And before you could say "George Orwell," they abandoned the term "teabagger" en masse, insisted they had never used it in the first place, and whined about how only mean liberals, Democrats and Communists called them that.

It didn't work. Liberal bloggers and pundits have long taken immense glee in pointing out how the teabaggers adopted the term as their own and then ran away from it as fast as they could.

But when the tea partiers have an opportunity, however ridiculous, to whimper and cast themselves as the victims, they grab on with both hands and won't let go. For example, in the new book The Promise: President Obama, Year One, Obama is quoted as saying that the Republicans' lockstep vote against the economic stimulus bill "helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans."

Cue the screams of outrage in three...two...one...

• Michelle Malkin: "Really. How many more selective civility police lectures can we take from this vulgarity-clogged White House?"
• Ian Lazaran: "Obama may be the most thin-skinned President we've ever had. It'll be funny to see him apologize for his crude, offensive, and juvenile language when this book officially comes out."
• Diane Student: "I for one appreciate the gay slur. Oh yes, Mr. President, thank you so much!"
  

Not to mention some of the classier comments on Fox Nation:

• "Obama you ignorant arrogant individual !!!!! if you don't have something intelligent to say then you should keep that hole in your face shut !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
• "I would much rather be a 'TeaBagger', than a communist, socialist, marxist, arrogant, rude dumbass like our prez is? How's that for civility??"
• "Obama as always has NO class. For a president to use the gay slang 'teabaggers' tells you all about him."
• "STFU you racist muslim dirtbag"

And so on. You get the picture.

The simple fact, of course, is that the tea-party movement originally called themselves "teabaggers," no matter how hard they try to forget it or bludgeon everyone else into forgetting it as well. Cloaking themselves in the political mantle of the original Boston Tea Party participants, the teabaggers loved calling themselves that and embraced the tea-bag image at every opportunity. Well, at least until they found out what it meant.

But hey, if the bag fits, wear it.