Some stuff just makes me laugh. Joe the Plumber on being called a “tea bagger” at work:
“Tea Bagger” has traditionally been a derogatory slur used to intimidate, put down, humiliate and otherwise taunt, smear, bully or just discriminate against gays – usually gay men – based on a sex act that gay men apparently made popular.
Decorum prevents me from describing it – they got this thing called “Google” now for that – but suffice it to say that the double-standard for what Democrats can say and what conservatives can say continues unabated, but still I thought to myself, did this guy think I’m gay, or was he making a statement of my political affiliation?
Suppose for a minute that we accept the fiction that “tea bagger” was at one time an anti-gay slur….why would it only USUALLY be used against gay *men*?
Mustang Bobby
Their obsession with sex creeps me out.
Belafon
If he doesn’t watch it, he’s going to snap his one functioning brain cell trying to bend that far. Hey Joe, your group started calling yourselves teabaggers before we did.
NotMax
Did not realize that one of the assembly lines at Chrysler produced vehicles that only turn to the right.
(Not to mention the exquisite irony of JtP getting paid at a company still in existence due to an infusion of government money.)
Jerzy Russian
I like how he is OK with “private” unions but opposes “pubic” unions. I wonder what kind of unions he used when we has a plumber.
Geeno
I didn’t think it was a slur; it just expresses a preference.
Teabagging your fallen foe is a standard taunt in most online pvp games.
Amir Khalid
As I recall, the Teabaggers only stopped calling themselves Teabaggers when people were pointing at them and laughing because they were unaware of the term’s sexual connotation.
Cacti
@Belafon:
This.
The rest of us just called them the name they chose for themselves, while snickering at their complete lack of awareness.
SatanicPanic
Wait, Teabaggers think this is a bad thing now?
Hawes
You know, after all the kicks in the balls that the Teanderthals have given to the American body politic, the least they can do is kiss it and make it better.
Hill Dweller
In other news, it appears Rupert Murdoch was repeatedly cuckolded by his soon to be ex-wife. What a shame…
Kay
It makes me laugh because Marcy Kaptur is there constantly. She may as well work there. There could be no bigger booster of that plant:
This is actually how she talks.
She should walk up to him, shake his hand, and congratulate him for leaving the ranks of the long-term unemployed. I think she could pull that off, in a sincere way :)
DougJ
@Kay:
Honestly, glad the guy has a decent job. I feel bad mocking someone who’s out of work, but it’s hard not to mock him.
slippytoad
@SatanicPanic:
Don’t ask one of these fuckwit morons for consistency. It’s impossible. Discrimination is bad and embarrassing, until it’s “just a joke or a reasonable question being asked.”
It just seems that this is the Decade of the Fucking Gigantic Asshole and Putting Up With His Endless Horseshit.
Keith G
Never understood that.
Tea Bagger?
C0ck s@cker?
Anti gay slur?
Those are highly valued skills.
If one wanted to slur my gayness back in the day…Call me a tw*t licker….eewwww. Nasty
slippytoad
@Amir Khalid:
This is correct. For awhile they even tried to make a “racist” victim-whine out of it. I remember being a real dick when they started that.
IN all cases, I have made 100% certain that when one of these assholes whines about the use of Teabagger, to redouble, louder, and more offensively. It is a delightful way to take their pissant little gun and turn it around in their face, making them very reluctant to use it anymore.
dubo
“I had three days of orientation, and now I’m ‘on the job’ over here at Chrysler and on Day 4, I’m outside on a break smoking a cigarette and right on cue – some guy calls me a ‘teabagger,'” Wurzelbacher wrote.
LOL. Not just a union member, but one of them gol durn lazy union members always on break!
Nate Dawg
As a gay man, I can attest that teabagging is not a popular sex act, but a joke sex act like a Cleveland Steamer that is rarely practiced.
Just search for teabagging porn videos and see–voila!–none, or very few I’d guess. Furthermore, I never have heard teabagger be used to refer to any gay man ever. The term wasn’t a noun, as far as I know, before the Tea party began calling themselves teabaggers.
Kay
@DougJ:
She’s a pro. She will be genuinely glad he has a job.
The truth is, the money behind the Tea Party dumped him a long time ago. I think Palin’s PAC was propping him up in 2012, but she couldn’t have given him a lot because he didn’t campaign at all.
Gex
As far as I can tell, teabagging is a thing that dude bros do to their buddies that pass out at parties.
In any event, many here have beaten me to it, but it bears repeating… This is what they chose to call themselves in 2009 and only stopped when they realized we were all laughing at them. Leave it to them to be so ignorant of history, even their own though it only goes back 4-5 years.
Hey, maybe they should try to reappropriate the name and call themselves teabaggers with pride.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
So, let me get this straight. Joe the Plumber has been teabagged with the crown jewels of Ohio?
dubo
@Gex: Yep. Teabagging is a prank that your frat brothers (or sometimes your cat) pull on you while you’re sleeping. It isn’t a “gay” thing
aimai
@Nate Dawg: Yes, this was my impression. The thing is that the Tea Party/Republican types belong eternally to the cult of the offended, perpetually offended by being called uncool, or stupid, or just plain morons. So they were going to find a reason to be insulted by anythign anyone outside their little cult said about/to them. They were dressing up in hats with tea bags stapled to the brims, for fuck’s sake, calling them ‘tea baggers” was as natural as it was uncontroversial and it was, in fact, what they called themselves. Moreover the white union guy who called Wurzelbacher that probably has no more idea that Wurzlebacher and the rest of the tea party that the word has/had other connotations. He’s pretty obviously using it in its political sense. So what’s the point of getting offended or pretending to be offended that the guy thinks you are gay? Calling someone gay in the first place is not a left wing slur, but a right wing one. Why isn’t W proud of his political affiliations and eager to share the good news? Why is he so embarrassed to be identified with his political party?
aimai
@Gex: So its homoerotic sexual assault by guys who identify as straight on guys they are friends with?
DougJ
@dubo:
Not sure the second sentence follows from the first.
Tim F.
To be fair, a lot of lesbians like tea. I think he is making a conceptual analogy to the M.C. Escher “three worlds” paradigm in which you represent three entirely different conceptual spheres with one phrase, those being the association of oneself with a well-regarded revolutionary movement through rhetoric and cosplay, steeping tea in a disposable bag, and the act of putting another man’s balls in your mouth. In my opinion an elegant and subtle use of language to convey a multiplicity of meaning. One would expect no less from an often angry man whose name and professional identity are both deeply ironic.
Randy P
@Belafon: And still do. This appears to be an announcement dated YESTERDAY by Joe the Not Plumber, asking whether he as a proud teabagger, will be welcomed in a union shop.
So I’m thinking Joe only got clued in within the last 24 hours.
Marc
@aimai:
I believe the term of art is “dudebros.”
Randy P
@Randy P: Could somebody get a screen shot of that page before it disappears down the memory hole? I’m on my phone.
Kay
@Frankensteinbeck:
I don’t have any patience with him because he’s so whiny. This is typical:
He’s also offended the guy told him he was a journeyman, so he has to challenge that based on his military service, you know, pulling that out as the big trump card in typical winger fashion.
He’s a pain in the ass. I can’t bear the persecution complex. I think it’s silly and self-centered.
Gex
@aimai: Yep. I’ve also seen a lot of comics in the Minneapolis scene even pantomime teabagging when they are clowning around. It’s really weird.
Nevermind the fact that I hate when supposedly gay-friendly guys like to humiliate each other by doing homoerotic things. Oh, how horrible and humiliating! But no offense, gay people. It’s just that whenever we like to take each other down a peg, we compare ourselves to you. It’s not even original or funny. It’s hack.
Gex
@Randy P: I have a screenshot of it.
Botsplainer
My recollection is that the teabag thing was first encouraged by Jim Robinson at Free Republic, as in sending teabags to Congress to remind them of the Tea Party early in 2009. It was right after the Santelli rant.
He’s a loathesome, clueless little man.
Corner Stone
@Gex:
Are you still referring to frat boy dudebros, or are these contemporaries of yours?
WJS
John Waters may have, but probably didn’t, bring “teabagging” to the masses with the film “Pecker,” which everyone should see right the hell now. That’s why it was so easy to mock the Tea Party when they adopted that whole early American ‘don’t tread on me’ bullcrap.
People who complain about being mocked by something crude are just revealing why it was so funny in the first place.
Gex
@Corner Stone: In this case I am talking about the comics on the scene who pantomime teabagging.
mike with a mic
@WJS:
Teabagging didn’t get so common through silly old indie movies that have little cultural impact, it’s from gaming, and it dates back to the early 90’s.
When you frag someone in an FPS (it started in Quake 1) you’d repeatedly squat over their head and bounce your crotch up and down, usually calling them a cocksucker and asking how your balls taste. It was considered fair game if your kill was suitably impressive (mid air rockets or forcing someone up the wall with the LTG where both teabag worthy kills), but was considered in poor taste if the kill wasn’t that good. It’s currently a way to torment new players and get around idiotic rules on not being allowed to hurl certain insults at people in certain games.
Just as “eat a bag of dicks” is gaming related as well. There’s a food store called dicks in Seattle that’s close to several major gaming conventions. If someone wasn’t good enough to compete they were told to “go eat a bag of dicks”, ie quit playing and go get food because you suck. Though it morphed out from there.
Movies generate culture for old conservatives, it’s all gaming all the time now for cultural impact.
Keith
Joe Da Plumber – still trying to prove he’s got the biggest balls of all …
Bobby Thomson
@Jerzy Russian: One of many points of disagreement between Sam Not-a-Plumber and me: I am a staunch advocate of pubic unions.
Bobby Thomson
@Gex: I also used to associate teabagging with sexual assault by dudebros against passed out drunk people, most of them male.
Bobby Thomson
@dubo:
You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to doubt that.
Citizen_X
@aimai:
Also known as “fraternity life.”
mike with a mic
@Bobby Thomson:
It’s part of the penis game. The penis game is simple. If someone passes out you take a picture of them with a dick on their face. If the dick is drawn that’s nice, if it’s an actual dick even better. Likewise when you’re say riding in a Humvee pulling gun duty, you pull your dick out. Then the first idiot who turns around to talk to you stares at your dick, which entitles you to punch them for free as hard as you can.
Over the course of a deployment, your goal is to generate as many free punches on suckers who started at your dick, and avoid having dicks drawn or placed on your face while sleeping. Think of it as a running score.
Though I’ve never heard anybody (at least within the Navy and USMC) consider it sexual assault. It’s more just generic silly pranks and other stuff that people do on deployment because they are bored out of their minds and start to go slightly crazy after a set amount of time. It doesn’t even really rate compared to most of the other stuff.
NotMax
@Bobby Thomson
Sometimes a set of testicles bouncing on your face is just a set of testicles bouncing on your face.
Citizen Alan
@Gex:
This. I had never heard the term used in any context other than pulling one’s balls out so that somebody else could take a picture of them resting on the head of some guy who’d passed out at a party with his shoes still on, and probably only after the guy’s face had been decorated with magic marker penises.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Kay: I bet she could!
Because she actually cares that one of her constituents is no longer unemployed.
@DougJ: He’s really hard not to mock. Can we just send him to Tupelo?
mike with a mic
@Citizen Alan:
And then stripping them naked, wrapping them in plastic wrap, and leaving them outside in the most dangerous area of town possible at night.
Biff Longbotham
To answer your question, Doug, I suppose that a woman generously endowed in the labial department might also be able to avail herself of this oh-so-sexy act of teabagging. I’m sure that’s what Joltin’ Joe had in mind.
another Holocene human
Joe the Plumber-as bad at anthropology as he is at plumbing, everything.
another Holocene human
@Kay: Nobody else in the trades has ever been in the military – lolwut?
Mike with a mic is correct about gaming culture. Although I’m sure John Waters had more to do with prominent gay tv personalities giggling over the name.
Corner Stone
@mike with a mic:
Man, I grew up with some rough motherfuckers but none of them would’ve done this shit to somebody.
Corner Stone
@Citizen Alan:
Sometimes I think maybe it’s a blessing I grew up bone fucking poor.
Corner Stone
@NotMax:
And sometimes it’s …uh..?
Is this like The Onion story where the guy goes to the park and demands to know why all the f@gs keep sucking his joint?
Keith G
@Corner Stone: ‘Joint’ sure has an interesting list of diverse meanings.
Cassidy
@Kay: If he has that much disdain for “journeyman” in a trade union, he won’t last long. They’ll bounce his ass.
NotMax
@Corner Stone
It was a (strained, admittedly) riff on the classic (and likely apocryphal) “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
Paul in KY
@DougJ: I was hoping the POS might be on the dole & maybe get an ounce of compassion for others.
cokane
never understood why tea bagging was considered a gay sex act. one set of balls, one mouth, and they can’t be on the same person. ive never had the hankering for it, but nothing about it strikes me as gay
Paul in KY
@Tim F.: These are the kinds of explanations that keep me coming back to BJ.
slippytoad
I keep thinking about this story and it is starting to bother me.
Joe isn’t a plumber, and he didn’t win any election last year. Why is the press so interested in his opinion? He’s not even going on to be a “statesman” because he was just some yutz the GOP wanted to use, and found out he wasn’t so useful.
So, the press has followed this has-been loser around to his now-very-unglamorous job which he has taken on a membership in a union, a thing that GOP/Teabaggers decry as if it is membership in a satanic coven.
I don’t know what the story is, but if it isn’t “foolish loudmouth learns to live with check stupid mouth wrote” I don’t know what it is. In Joe the Plumber, I see a remarkably talentless man who has very little if nothing to say, but is arrogantly convinced that once HE says it, we’ll all understand. Fails to get anywhere in politics, is cut back down to size and returned to ordinary life with the rest of us slobs, his big fucking mouth having failed to teach anyone anything?
If this isn’t a lesson in humility (and we’re talking about a Teabagger here, so we know it is not) what are they trying to do? This guy isn’t a hero at fucking all. He’s not . . . . anything!
Paul in KY
@mike with a mic: I’m glad I was in the USAF.
Thank you for the explanation, though.
Bobby Thomson
@Corner Stone:
Yeah, pretty much.
boatboy_srq
@Mustang Bobby: @Nate Dawg: The problem for the Teahad is that this nifty little term for themselves (all bedecked with herbe de Lipton) turned out to have connections with Teh Ghey and Teh Secks. I can’t tell which is funnier/creepier: a movement that started out Taxed Enough Already developing a fetish for wearing foodstuffs, or members of same fixating on how their ignorance only makes them look more stupid.
TG Chicago
I like how he assumes the guy who called him a “teabagger” is a Democrat but claims to wonder if it was an anti-gay slur.
If it was an anti-gay slur, there’s no logic in assuming the guy was a Democrat. In fact, he’s more likely to be on the right side of the aisle.
Of course, JtP knows perfectly well that the term had nothing to do with hating on gays. It’s funny how he gives away the game.
Suddenly I’m wondering…. will the 27%ers start supplementing their “Blacks are the real racists!!!” talk with some “Teh gheys are the real homophobes!!!”?
mellowjohn
i’ve rather enjoyed all the “pubic” unions i’ve joined, and i really appreciate the public union i belong to: AFT #1, the Chicago Teachers Union.
LanceThruster
A “Joe the Plumberism” needs to be added to the lexicon.
Bubblegum Tate
@Botsplainer:
There’s also the classic “I’m teabagging 4 Jesus” picture.
J R in WV
I was in the USN, never heard of anything like the activity described above. Thankfully!
Sounds Republican to me.
DissidentFish
@Nate Dawg: Yes it reminds me of the Simpsons clip show line:
and then after the commercial
mike with a mic
@J R in WV:
Green or blue side though?
If you spent all your time on the ship, yeah there are other things but not that. If you bleed your blood in the mud it with the USMC it was really fucking common.
It’s an infantry and shooter thing. That’s how I ran into it. It’s also class based. it’s for the hicks we send to die, not the middle class types that will never get shot at.