Teabagging Me With A Spoon

The tea parties have ended without incident - the dark cloud of fascism did NOT descend on America - but the pros in the media and the Left protest brigades are still trying to figure out how they can ridicule the whole thing. Many have focused on the fact that "teabagging" is a gay euphemism for, uh, I'll let your imagination paint a picture. This analysis, which was in the SF Chronicle, is typical: Finally, Rush defines "tea bagging"...sort of

First we can all stop snickering about the whole "teabagging" thing. As in: Why do supporters INSIST on using that word? Don't they know what it means -- in the non-Lipton sense? Perhaps after Keith Olbermann's none-too-subtle mockery of the phrase this week ("If things get too testy, things might just blow up in Fox's face") Rush Limbaugh decided to clue in his peeps about what teabagging, ahem, really means.

But I can't say that on the air, Rush said Wednesday, before the mass national teabagathon. This is a family program. Finally, he said, "think of steeping" tea bags.

Or don't.

OK, so this guy won't be taking George Will's place in the ranks of pnditry. Still, I am confused as to why "teabagging" is supposed to be so unintentionally funny. For one thing, I have never heard the tea parties referred to as a verb. People have talked about tea, tea bags, tea parties. I haven't heard a word (outside of the wiseguy hipster set) about "teabagging." Anyway, if a concept would lose all credibility because of a pre-existing gay euphemism, our intellectual and political life would be much the poorer. I have lived in SF long enough to know that the gays have euphemisms the rest of us can only dream of. Here is just a partial list (it helps to say each one with the hint of a leer): 

Picture framing
Reading a book 
Running out of printer ink
Israel Lobbying
Cutting and pasting
Bush v Gore
Freeing Mumia
Buying Sasha & Malia a dog
Spiderholing
Captured By Somali Pirates
Visiting grandma
Listening to Beethoven
Staying at the Bellagio
The Back-Alley Abortion
Laundry balling 
Disagreeing with Obama
Dinner at Rush Limbaugh's House
Adopting a Malawi orphan
Watching John Stewart
Appeasing the Taliban
Winning American Idol
Meeting the Parents
Singaporing
Smart Power
Exercising our rights to free speech and association

There's more, a lot more. But you get the drift

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