The Urban Dictionary site provides definitions of slang (words and phrases) and the acceptance of "teabagging" as everyday speech has been a source of great delight to Matt Taibbi, gonzo journalist extraordinaire. Over the past several days, Taibbi has been tea-bagging Michelle Malkin and her rabid, wingnut followers. Teabagging is an appropriate term for these nuts. As one wag wrote: "I was rather enthusiastic about the 'Teabagging Party' to which I was invited until I found out that it was a tax protest." If this is a (fair & balanced) double entendre, so be it.
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[1] Matt Taibbi Teabags Michelle Malkin
[2] Matt Taibbi Teabags The Teabaggers
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Teabagging Michelle Malkin
By Matt Taibbi"Many protesters expressed a sense that basic American freedoms of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are threatened by new Washington policies seen by many as more socialistic than capitalistic. The proposed taxpayer bailout of homeowners who may have inflated their earnings in order to secure mortgages is one example, says Jeff Crawford, a protester from Dacula, GA.
'The first year after the Mayflower arrived, the colonists tried a communal method of storing and sharing food and it failed miserably,' says Mr. Crawford. 'Why are things any different now?'
Eighteenth-century symbolism was rife at the Atlanta event as speakers drew comparisons with the Boston patriots who dumped the King’s tea in Boston Harbor to protest taxation without representation, an act that began the American Revolution and the founding of the United States."
via Michelle Malkin » A Tax Day Tea Party Cheat Sheet: How It All Started.
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I have to say, I’m really enjoying this whole teabag thing. It’s really inspiring some excellent daydreaming. For one thing, it’s brought together the words teabag and Michelle Malkin for me in a very powerful, thrilling sort of way. Not that I haven’t ever put those two concepts together before, but this is the first time it’s happened while in the process of reading her actual columns.
Previously Michelle Malkin’s writing was on the edge of unreadable; she’s sort of like Ann Coulter, only without that tiny fraction of P.T. Barnum/Mick Jagger-esque self-promotional flair that makes Coulter at least vaguely interesting. When you read Ann Coulter, you know you’re reading someone who would fuck a hippopotamus if she thought it would boost her Q rating. That’s a rare quality and it commands one’s attention.
Michelle Malkin doesn’t have that. She’s just a mean little dunce who’s wedged herself into a nicely paying career as a GOP spokesclown, and she’s going to ride that gig for as long as it keeps gas in her minivan.
And that’s fine, good for her. But that doesn’t make her readable. However, this move of hers to spearhead the teabag movement really adds an element to her writing that wasn’t there before. Now when I read her stuff, I imagine her narrating her text, book-on-tape style, with a big, hairy set of balls in her mouth. It vastly improves her prose. See for yourself; just put your thinking cap on and read this:
What and who exactly are President Obama’s homeland security officials afraid of these days? If you are a member of an active conservative group that opposes abortion, favors strict immigration enforcement, lobbies to protect Second Amendment rights, protests big government, advocates federalism or represents veterans who believe in any of the above, the answer is: You.
[Note: I originally tried to redo that passage and phonetically sound out how the new, improved version might sound, but on the page it came out too offensive even for me. If anyone can figure out a way to do it more tastefully, I'd love to see it.]
Anyway this teabag thing has really gotten out of control. It’s amazing, literally amazing to me, that it wasn’t until Obama pushed through a package containing a massive public works package and significant homeowner aid that conservatives took to the streets. In other words, it wasn’t until taxes turned into construction jobs and mortgage relief that working and middle-class Americans decided to protest. I didn’t see anyone on the street when we forked over billions of dollars to help JP Morgan Chase buy Bear Stearns. And I didn’t see anyone on the street when Hank Paulson forked over $45 more billion to help Bank of America buy Merrill Lynch, a company run at the time by one of the world’s biggest assholes, John Thain. Moreover I didn’t see any street protests when the government agreed to soak up hundreds of billions in “troubled assets” from Citigroup, a company that just months later would lend out a jet furnished with pillows upholstered with Hermes scarves to former chief Sandy Weill so that he could vacation in Mexico over Christmas.
Look, I’m a taxpayer too. And I’m no less pissed off than any of these people about the taxes I have to pay. Just today I was reading hedge-fund manager David Einhorn’s book, Fooling Some of the People All of the Time, about his battles with a company called Allied Capital. Einhorn was shorting Allied because he found accounting irregularities in Allied’s books after analyzing the firm. Among other things, he found that an Allied subsidiary called BLX was irresponsibly handling tens of millions in Small Business Association loans, shoving this SBA money out to unworthy recipients and costing the taxpayer an enormous amount of money. When Einhorn went to the SBA, they basically blew him off. “We see this all the time; what’s so special about those?” was the SBA official’s response when Einhorn presented him with evidence of loan fraud. Einhorn pointed out that one of the reasons companies like BLX got away with bilking the government was because the enforcement agencies were so understaffed: he routinely found that agencies like the SEC and the OIG could not or would not investigate fraud against the taxpayer because they had no staff to pursue the investigations.
That attitude, that complete and total I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude about taxpayer money, that’s endemic to almost every branch of the government. We saw in the last five years how contractors in Iraq nakedly robbed money from the you and me, running phantom convoys across the desert (some companies called that transporting “sailboat fuel”), systematically risking human life and gouging the taxpayer more or less right out in the open. There was over $100 billion in sole-source, non-competitive contracts in Iraq in 2006; a House Committee identified just 50 contracts totalling more than $21 billion that require “scrutiny,” but not much has been recovered so far. Why did they get away with it? Because there is basically no serious enforcement mechanism, in the military or anywhere else, for preserving taxpayer money given to contractors. In Iraq, the military auditor, SIGIR, had about seventy men in the entire military theater at the time I was there. We just bailed out AIG to the tune of more than $160 billion; its primary auditor, the Office of Thrift Supervision, had exactly one insurance expert on its staff while AIG was falling apart. There were staff cuts at the SEC several times in the last ten years; in fact there was a crucial cut of the SEC budget in an $821 billion Omnibus spending bill at the tail end of 2003 (just in time for the housing bubble) that was packed with plenty of pork and, again, inspired no protests from Joe Sixpack.
Meanwhile the federal government has systematically expanded a whole ecosystem of contractor-handout programs, most of them with names the public has never heard of. How many people out there are aware of all the millions in grants given to fortune 500 companies over the years through the Advanced Technology Program (ATP), which basically subsidizes the R&D departments of already rich firms while allowing those same companies to keep the benefits of those innovations? How about the nearly $5 billion in loan guarantees given to Boeing over the years through the Ex-Im Bank? How about the Foreign Military Financing Program, which gives millions of dollars to dozens of foreign countries every year so that they can buy American-made weapons?
Or how about the four or five billion dollars we spent annually for the last decade or so on Federal Housing Authority subsidies? Well, actually, the teabaggers probably would get riled up about those programs, which subsidize mortgage loans to low-income homeowners. The one constant in teabagger outrage is that the whatever wasteful government program they’re freaking out about has to benefit some poor slob, or else they usually don’t give a shit. What they forget, of course, is that FHA loans ultimately benefit the banks a lot more than the poor slobs — a homeowner defaulting on his FHA loan loses his house, but the bank that irresponsibly issued the loan (without fear, knowing they are backed up by the government) is still fully compensated, with you picking up the tab.
So yeah, government waste sucks, it’s rampant at every level, and taxes are a vicious racket, and everyone should be pissed off . What’s hilarious about the teabaggers, though, is how they never squawk about waste until the spending actually has a chance of benefiting them. You will never hear of a teabagger crying about OPIC giving $50 million in free insurance to some mining company so that they can dig for silver in rural Bolivia. You won’t hear of a teabagger protesting the $2.5 billion in Ex-Im loans we gave to GE through the early part of this decade, even as GE was moving nearly a hundred thousand jobs overseas over the course of ten years. And Michelle Malkin’s readers didn’t seem to mind giving IBM millions in Ex-IM and ATP loans at the same time it was giving its former CEO, Lou Gerstner, $260 million in stock options.
In other words teabaggers don’t mind paying taxes to fund the salaries of Bolivian miners, Lou Gerstner’s stock options, deliveries of “sailboat fuel,” the Hermes scarves on Sandy Weill’s jet pillows, or even the export of their own goddamn jobs. But they do hate it when someone tries to re-asphalt their roads, or help bail their slob neighbor out of foreclosure. And God forbid someone propose a health care program, or increased financial aid for college. Hell, that’s like offering to share your turkey with the other Pilgrims! That’s not what America is all about! America is every Pilgrim for himself, dammit! Raise your own motherfucking turkey!
Oh, and there’s one other thing. I heard today from Steve Wamhoff of Citizens for Tax Justice. He had an interesting tidbit to offer on the teabagging movement. According to his research, 39% of respondents with incomes below $30,000 told the Gallup agency that they felt that federal income tax levels were “too high.” Which is interesting, because only 32% of respondents in that income category will pay any federal income taxes at all on their 2008 income. You can draw your own conclusions.
The really irritating thing about these morons is that, guaranteed, not one of them has ever taken a serious look at the federal budget. Not one has ever bothered to read an actual detailed study of what their taxes pay for. All they do is listen to one-liners doled out by tawdry Murdoch-hired mouthpieces like Michelle Malkin and then repeat them as if they’re their own opinions five seconds later. That’s what passes for political thought in this country. Teabag on, you fools.
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Questions I'd Like "Teabaggers" To Answer
By Matt Taibbi
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So as could be expected I was deluged with mail this weekend, most of it from outraged Michelle Malkin readers, and nearly all of whom sounded the same basic theme: that I was a bad, bad person for issuing ad hominem attacks and should be discredited for "not having my facts straight" and for being too much of a coward to "debate the real issues."
Which is interesting, except that no one actually found an incorrect fact in anything I wrote, and no one seemed very interesting in debating any issues. Instead, about 99% of the mail I got focused on the name-calling and the "childish" sexual innuendoes. I would say that is my fault, that I should have known that once you start dropping sack onto another columnist's face in public you can pretty much forgo any expectation of being taken seriously — except that when dealing with teabagger types, you know in advance you're not going to be taken seriously anyway. So the incentive to be restrained in one's response (particularly when the people you're arguing with are running around screaming about the fascist threat with tea bags dangling absurdly from their hat-brims) is not particularly strong.
But the real reason nobody takes the teabaggers seriously is that they have no answers to several enormous holes in the parody of a protest argument they tried to make last week. I got nearly two hundred letters this weekend and not one of them had an answer for any of the following:
A number of people wrote in to me and complained that the only reason I'm not seeing eye to eye with them is that I have no children and therefore don't care about the debt burden in the future. Oh, please. There's only one reason we're talking about "the children" in this debate at all: because 95% of the people protesting the tax outrage will actually be getting a tax break. Until you can plausibly answer the question of why future government debt burdens didn't bother you during the last eight years or massive deficit spending, that whole "O the children!" bullshit has to be put back on the shelf.
Anyway, I'd really be curious to hear some answers to these questions. Because if the spending argument is moot, if the bailout argument is moot, if the pork argument is moot, and the tax argument is moot, then what you're left with is arguing that it's not waste when we spend billions handing out soccer balls in the Anbar province, but it is waste when we build bridges in Peoria and Tulsa.
The only thing even remotely resembling a logical justification for any of this was the argument, made by several letter-writers, that the fact that the teabaggers are hypocrites doesn't necessarily make them wrong about the Obama budget. If that point is conceded at the top, I think most Americans would be willing to discuss the rest of it, because that's a discussion worth having. The problem is that once you admit that you sat on your hands during a period of unprecedented waste for eight years, it makes it very hard to take when you start calling yourselves victims of fascism and tyranny and threatening to secede in year nine, which just happens to be the first year of a new regime you oppose politically. In other words if you concede the hypocrisy, the hysteria automatically becomes obnoxious and wrong. So I don't think the "My hypocrisy is irrelevant" line holds water, not unless you can answer one more question:
[As Rolling Stone’s chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi has written Spanking the Donkey: On the Campaign Trail with the Democrats (2005); Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire (2007): and The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire (2008). Taibbi graduated from Bard College in 1991.]
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