A Note on Terms: Teabagger

So I was watching Rachel Maddow's hour-long interview with Jon Stewart (which I recommend that you all watch here if you're allergic to the MSNBC website) last night, and he pointed out that her giddy use of the phrase "teabagger" to describe the Tea Party movement might undermine her journalistic credibility, at least somewhat.

Stewart noted that the word can't be taken as anything other than derogatory. Maddow asked if he didn't find it funny that the word originated with the movement itself when they chanted "teabag Washington before Washington teabags you, obviously ignorant of its sexual connotation. Jon replied, "Yeah, for about a day" but he stopped using the term almost immediately thereafter.

The basic point was that as a comedian, Stewart doesn't have the same limitations that Maddow, as a journalist-serious media commentator, should. Moreover, Stewart asserted that when the news media moves closer to what he does, it diminishes itself. It was a pretty shrewd point and it was interesting to watch him debate with Maddow, who I actually like, despite my political disagreements with her.

You'll have likely noticed that I don't call Tea Partiers "teabaggers." In fact, I doubt that I ever have in this space, although I'm entirely too lazy to check. That's not out of kindness or because I believe the easily disprovable Teapublican talking point that they didn't coin the term before the professional left appropriated it. As a matter of fact, as soon as Republican tools started saying that, I debated using the term myself. After all, few things infuriate me as much as the blatant dishonesty of people like Andrew Brietbart and Sean Hannity.

I'm decidedly not above using derogatory terms to describe those I disagree with. Frankly, I can't remember the last essay I wrote without calling someone an idiot. Moreover, I don't even dislike the Tea people, per se. I think that they're sincere, if wildly misinformed and bewilderingly ignorant of things like basic mathematics. But the rank and file of the movement aren't bad people, for the most part. Besides, I think that it's kind of quaint that they really didn't know the other, more dubious, meaning of teabagging.

But that's not the reason I don't use it. I don't use the term "Islamofascist" simply because it would indicate that I don't know what Islamism or fascism actually are, but that has little to do with my reluctance to call populists teabaggers.

It really just boils down to one thing: I would never want to sully the beauty and innocence of something as wonderful as lowering my testicles into someone's mouth by associating the practice with something as ugly, vapid, and ultimately pointless as Republican primary politics.

I guess that makes me an idealist, which is funny because I despise idealism.