Cooper: “It’s hard to talk when you’re teabagging.”

Win.

Even CNN is getting on the “let’s mock Fox New’s little ratings grabbing stunt” game.  “Hard to talk when you’re teabagging.”  Classic.

Ah, Anderson Cooper. This is why we like him.

Don’t you know? Socialism and Fascism are the exact same thing.  Really.

On a similar note, I’m currently debating a libertarian on a political forum who claims that the stock market is a form of Marxism.  Apparently any time more than one person owns something, its ‘collective ownership’ and is just one step away (if that) from the government controlling everything.  Its hard to figure out how to argue with such insanity/stupidity.

Nothing to add except that this article:

How FreedomWorks Gave The Teabaggers A Dirty Sanchez

That and the MSNBC Countdown video about this seminal event that was overflowing (so to speak) with double-entendres.

You could wait your whole journalistic career for the opportunity to say something like that.

A fascist?

“Thanks”, Jonah Goldberg, for making millions of idiots even more politically illiterate than they were before they read your book.

any time more than one person owns something, its ‘collective ownership’

So basically he’s advocating a strict tyrannical/feudalistic monarchy?

Eeeenteresting…

...I would have paid real money to see the faces in the control room when A.C. said that…

Don’t you know? Socialism and Fascism are the exact same thing.  Really.

A winger on one message board told me Fascism is leftist because Nazi means “National Socialist”.

I kid you not.

Using that logic mainland China really is a People’s Republic, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was democratic, and the Holy Roman Empire was holy, Roman, and an empire.

You could wait your whole journalistic career for the opportunity to say something like that.

That’s the level of disdain at work here. These kind of jokes always fly around newsrooms, but it’s rare that corporate allows them to make it to air or print. The Daily Show is going to have to work extra hard tonight to top the stuff we’ve seen from Countdown, Maddow, and now Anderson Cooper.

It just makes me so sad that the education in our country is so lacking that these assholes don’t seem to understand NO ONE has had their taxes go up, and when the Bush Tax Cuts expire, the rich will be taxed at the rate they were under the Clinton boom times.

More than that, that the Bush tax cuts were meant to stimulate the economy, AND THEY FAILED SPECTACULARLY—except as a proof that trickle-down is a fantasy.

Where were these people when Cheney and Halliburton were ransacking the treasury with no-bid , unaudited contracts that they never had to fulfill?  Obama put the war in the budget, instead of off budget like W, but deficit spending is what Republicans do.

And fuck Firefox for still claiming “Obama” is misspelled.

So basically he’s advocating a strict tyrannical/feudalistic monarchy?

No, no - monarchy is a form of government, which would be eeeeeevil!  So long as you call the guy with absolute power an ‘entrepreneur’, though, its A-OK.

No, no - monarchy is a form of government, which would be eeeeeevil!  So long as you call the guy with absolute power an ‘entrepreneur’, though, its A-OK.

What about “mob boss”? Because that’s essentially who would fill the power vacuum with a weak or de-centralized government.

There really isn’t much logical thought here.  I stopped by the Philly protest(which had maybe a little over a hundred participants) protest for a bit, and there were several people with “No taxation without representation” signs, right next to others with signs complaining about Congress.

It just makes me so sad that the education in our country is so lacking that these assholes don’t seem to understand NO ONE has had their taxes go up, and when the Bush Tax Cuts expire, the rich will be taxed at the rate they were under the Clinton boom times.

It just makes me so sad that the education in our country is so lacking that these assholes don’t seem to understand the alternate meaning of the label they’ve chosen for themselves. It’s another wingnut case of balls over brains, I guess (sorry, couldn’t resist).

It just makes me so sad that the education in our country is so lacking that these assholes don’t seem to understand NO ONE has had their taxes go up, and when the Bush Tax Cuts expire, the rich will be taxed at the rate they were under the Clinton boom times.

FWIW, when you call a “smarter” winger on this, they will claim that Scrotum Pride ‘09 is “not a protest against higher taxes”.

TO is right, the smarter ones will say “oh it’s the higher spending”.

Which still doesn’t make sense, however, because George W. Bush spent more than any President in history, including Lyndon Johnson!

there were several people with “No taxation without representation” signs, right next to others with signs complaining about Congress.

The stupid just burns.

You live in a democratic republic.  Just because your candidate lost, doesn’t mean you aren’t represented.  You are a minority interest, and the courts are there to protect you from the tyranny of the majority.

Fucking anti-American whiners.

The whole event seems to based on exacly the sort of ‘reasoning’ as the fascist guy uses: They’re really mad about something. They’re not really sure what it is, what caused it or who is responsible for causing it… but wow are they mad.

And a Democrat is president… no more fancy explaining required, I guess.

The whole event seems to based on exacly the sort of ‘reasoning’ as the fascist guy uses: They’re really mad about something. They’re not really sure what it is, what caused it or who is responsible for causing it… but wow are they mad.

They’re mad that someone is “Presidenting while Black”.

So, I’m just not getting this whole teabagging thing—I’m either just extremely obtuse, or perhaps overestimating the historical knowledge of the righties.  For one thing, I have never ever heard of the participants in the Boston Tea Party referred to as “tea-baggers”, and in fact, it’s my understanding that the tea wasn’t even in bags, but in chests.  My only conclusion is that despite history, someone came up with the term for “tea-bagging” with intentional reference to balls-dunking in order to glean attention (or, perhaps it’s the work of an inside sabateur with the sense of humor of a 12-year-old boy—about my level, so I’m down—who just wanted to hear the sexually-repressed idiots say “tea-bagging” over and over).

...Which brings me to my next grumble about this whole thing.  Do these jackasses even understand what the tea party was about?  They were pissed they were getting taxed while not having elections for their public officials.  It’s not that they lost a fucking election, it’s that they didn’t have the opportunity to vote at all.  If the current tea-baggers didn’t vote, they can’t really complain, and if they did, well, they still can’t really complain about “taxation without representation”.  Again, that was the whole damn point.

I mean, peaceful protesting is groovy, even when I don’t agree with the cause, but these guys are just coming off looking like folks who didn’t make it through second-grade history.

Also, I think they should donate the million tea bags to local soup kitchens or food banks.

When this is over by the end of the day can we stop hearing about this stupidity? PLEASE!!!  Imagine what the country could have accomplished if these people had donated their time and money to something that really needed help in their community?

Aftercancer—Exactly!  Which is why they should donate the tea. Then it won’t be a total waste.

Weeellll…

Not to give these complete idiots some small sliver of credence, the “socialism” part of National Socialism was taken pretty seriously by some elements of the Nazi Party.  Goebbels and others were Communitarians, in which they believed that Capital should be used for the good of the people.  Mind you, most Party members were lower middle class, which meant they wanted to keep their stuff but wanted to take rich peoples’ stuff away from them (most specifically, Jewish rich peoples’ stuff.)  A lot of lower-ranking SA and Party members were called “beefsteak Nazis” - brown on the outside and red inside.

Furthermore, the Nazis did do things like paid vacations, cruise ships for working people, and other sops to the Labor movement (like the “People’s Car,” our favorite VW Bug.)  Hitler himself crushed the “red” Nazis in 1934 (the “Roehm Putsch”), but not because he had any specific antipathy towards “racial Socialism.” 

But, again to be picky, if you’re talking Fascism you’re talking the “ideal” model which is Italian, not German (and can also be applied to Franco’s model which was closer to the Italian type than the German type.)  Private property is just fine, but the State organizes and gives subsidies to large industries for its own purposes (building large battleships, airplanes, and other things that go Boom.)  Which, ironically, means that Fascism’s definition of State use of its taxation and economic control power is very close to aforementioned wingnuts’, i.e. the State spends money and subsidises industries that build things that go Boom with the money it takes from taxation.

Ergo, these teabaggers are a bunch of Facsists.

Yay circular logic!

“They’re mad that someone is “Presidenting while Black”.”

...while i do think this makes it worse, I think encephalopath’s statement, “And a Democrat is president…” covers most of it.  As has been said, this whole teabagging silliness is just a public tantrum, the kind of thing a child will do when they don’t get what they want.

Here’s the deal:  The wingnuts got their government, exactly the way they wanted it, all three branches in the hands of the Reichwing, and things went to shit.  They have believed for the last 45-years or so that Conservatism is the one and only correct political philosophy, that will cure all of America’s problems if implemented.

Well, here we are, wingnuts, standing in the smoking ruins that resulted from your political ideas.  And instead of meekly and quietly slipping away into deserved obscurity, you people instead have public tantrums because your ideas didn’t work. 

Accept it.  Own it.  40-years of Nixonism, Reaganism, Bushism, and Bush Jr-ism all led to Epic FAIL.  And no number of teabags and the teabagging idiots who think they are political salvation will change that…

I hope that if any of these assholes are “gettin’ any” at all, that teabagging (the bedroom version, not the gaming version) is now completely off the menu for them because their partners can’t keep a straight face. Or they start laughing in the middle of it and accidentally apply teeth.

You’re probably right, some of it is that he has a “D” next to his name, too.

I was in early Elementary School in 1993, so can someone tell me if they went this insane this quickly under Clinton? I’m surprised at how quickly they’ve lost their marbles with Obama. He’s only been in office a little under four months and their eating the furniture. I’m just curious if the fact he is black made them go nuts faster, or if they went this batshit with Clinton right out of the gate, too.

Ben, they went nuts on Clinton right away.  In fact, some of the efforts to get dirt on Clinton and stir up Whitewater, etc., were already underway before his inauguration…

MikeEss FTW.

Ben D: The Big Dog’s honeymoon didn’t last long, either. Newt’s boys were able to pick up enough steam to capture Congress two years later, and that can’t happen overnight. Plus his campaign was already loaded with Gennifer Flowers & whatnot, so he walked right into the shitstorm on day one. However, the economy was not in total freefall and we were not engaged in two foreign occupations at the time. The fact that he was a southern white dude probably helped as well.

JMP - WHAAA?  We had a protest in favor of teabagging in Philly? I bet it was the same 100 cranks, batshitters and racist dittoheads who regularly comment on philly.com (the Inquirer website).

The weather was so craptacular today in DC and Philly, proof, as Ben Franklin said, that God loves us.

They didn’t go crazy quite as quickly under Clinton, but it was close.  It was pretty early on that the murder and drug-dealing accusations started flying.  I think Obama’s race has made the right lose it even faster, along with the presence of Fox News - back then, the far-right media was limited to radio & print.

Kathy - yep, at Love Park, and it was rather pathetic and amusing.  Philebrity has some good pictures up.

Good point, JMPEsq. Limbaugh and his ilk weren’t as omnipresent in ‘93 as they are now. Damned Fox News is on in the lobby of my building, for chrissakes.

For one thing, I have never ever heard of the participants in the Boston Tea Party referred to as “tea-baggers”, and in fact, it’s my understanding that the tea wasn’t even in bags, but in chests.

Or crates. There was a tea/coffee merchant near me that sold or gave away its crates, and they’re often lovely things, stamped with the details of where they come from.

But since Lipton tastes of dipped scrotum, it’s a good choice.

I would think that April 15 would be the worst day of all to do this. I just did my taxes and they went down significantly. I have to think a lot of people are in the same situation and are thinking WTF?

No, they went after Clinton right away. I was 25 and still naïve enough to believe that things were going to change and we’d become more like Western Europe. But he wasn’t even in office this long before the cranks went after him.

The only real difference is that back then, they weren’t quite such direct attacks of fascism, socialism or anything like that. It was all about Clinton’s character: his big appetites were constantly held up as a sign of his political corruption. This almost totally didn’t work, because the only people who might be persuaded by such an argument were already voting Republican: most everyone else either disbelieved it already or was willing to accept a little corruption if it helped get things done. Even when they got a little better organized and went after the health care program, the “Harry and Louise” ads weren’t overtly ideological. That didn’t happen until 1994, when the Republicans didn’t even run against Clinton so much as against a (totally corrupt and ossified) Democratic Congress. Their platform was (meant to appear) less ideological than practical and prudent.

Those were some bad years.

Ben, they went nuts on Clinton right away.

Wait, what?  I thought the tea-bagging only started this year…

tannenburg… you hit the nail on the head.  It seems to me that Godwin’s law might not necessarily apply when discussing actual principles of fascism, eh?

I heard some teabagger crowing earlier on NPR; the host was trying to be polite (‘natch) but the smugness and self-congratulatory nature of the commenter’s words rang a bit hollow anyway…“We were thrilled with the outcome. We never thought we could fill Lafayette Square, as much as we did.”

...In other words, we didn’t fill it.  Fail.

Wait, what?  I thought the tea-bagging only started this year…

I’m really not sure who deserves to take it on the chin more, you or MikeEss.

Ok, I’ll stop now.

I have to think a lot of people are in the same situation and are thinking WTF?

I’m in the same boat.  I got a refund this year for the first time in a long time (for reasons unrelated to tax rates, I’m pretty sure), and I have at least 5 friends who were scared shitless anticipating the taxes they’d have to pay, only to discover that it wasn’t as bad this year.  I know we can’t ascribe it to Obama because we’re still under Bush tax policy, but still.

It’s also hard to teabag when you’re doubled over with laughter. 

Not to give these complete idiots some small sliver of credence, the “socialism” part of National Socialism was taken pretty seriously by some elements of the Nazi Party.

Not at all true. No more than “right to work” laws or privatizing Social Security are evidence of Republicans’ concern for workers today. Slogans are not reality.

A lot of lower-ranking SA and Party members were called “beefsteak Nazis” - brown on the outside and red inside.

And Spencer Bachus says there are 17 socialists in Congress.

Furthermore, the Nazis did do things like paid vacations, cruise ships for working people,

You’re talking about the Kraft durch Freude program. “Bread and circuses” does not socialism make. The cruises were discounted, not free, and in practice only available to loyal party members. The purpose of KdF was to make leisure time just as regimented as work and military time. People with free time are dangerous to an authoritarian government. Closely watched, strictly regimented leisure is much less dangerous. Leisure was promoted not because it’s good for people—if that goal were an end in itself then that might be socialism—but because leisure would help Germans work harder and fight harder for the Nazi party and the state. As Hitler said, “because I want a determined people with strong nerves, for truly great politics can only be achieved with a people that keeps its nerves.”

and other sops to the Labor movement (like the “People’s Car,” our favorite VW Bug.)

Selling a relatively cheap car through a weekly payment program is pure capitalism. There’s no stretch of the imagination that makes this an overture to the labor movement.

Speaking of the labor movement, the Nazis outlawed it.

Outlawing the labor movement certainly is not socialism. They replaced it with the Deutsche Arbeitsfront, a fascist union which outlawed striking, and which did not allow workers to vote.

There’s no doubt that socialism was popular at the time the Nazis came to power. And some socialist-leaning people were initially attracted by slogans that co-opted socialist language, like compassionate conservatism or the way Mike Huckabee is a “populist.” But judging the Nazis on their actual policies, there’s no socialism there.

It’s also hard to teabag when you’re doubled over with laughter.

There was a commentator on Balloon Juice who made this observation:

“First they teabagged the Communists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

Then they teabagged the trade unionists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they teabagged the Jews,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then they came to teabag me
And there was no one left to speak up,
Because they all had their mouths full.”

Just watching all the videos now (home from work), only to discover…

Hey, that’s Susan Roesgen!  She was one of our local New Orleans anchors when I was growing up.  And she sounds PISSED!  Kick stupid wingnut ass, Susan!

asdf -

Not to completely derail this thread into a comparative political debate over the nature of the Nazi brand of authoritarianism, what I was trying to communicate was that for a segment (agreed, not by any means the majority) of the Nazi Party the socialist aspect of their ideology was real.  Goebbels and the Strasser brothers were “North” Nazis who took their anti-Capitalist ideology seriously; many of the “North” Nazis were equally sympathetic with the labor-movement agitation of the SA and lower Party members.  That’s not to say Hitler and the “Bavarians” were in sympathy with those movements…Hitler was always far more interested in the National/Racist part of the ideological melange that was their ideology.

You’re also right to say that the bread-and-circuses aspect of the Nazi labor movement disguised gutting what was a vibrant Leftist movement in 1920s Germany.  The “Beefsteaks” were actually ex-Communists who jumped ship in the early ‘30s because they, in the end, were more German than Internationalist in character.  However, it’s also true to say that Roehm and his SA clique had decided anti-aristocratic and anti-big-Capitalist aspirations, which is one of the reason Hitler purged them in 1934 with the urging and collusion of the aristocratic club that was the German Army.

In the end one must say that the Nazi Party from 1935 on was most decidedly not Socialist, no matter what their window-dressing (in fact real wages and benefits sank from 1936 on despite the economic overheating that rearming produced, and in fact wages were held down in order to preserve cash for more armaments spending.)

So I guess I would agree that my first skimming was half-joking and there was nothing really “Socialist” about National Socialism, but I stand by my inference that there were - for some Party members - genuine aspirations towards a Socialism of some sort.  It’s interesting that the anti-Plutocratic rhetoric continued all the way until 1945 despite the reality of the massive expansion of Capitalist oligarchs such as Krupp or IG Farben under the tutelage of the Nazi Party.

Back to your previously scheduled snarking…

Why do conservatives have to ruin everything? Their idea of pro-life ideology is so oppressive, it makes me want to kill myself. Freedom has been turned into worshipping the Republicans that don’t represent half the country. And now they’ve ruined teabagging!

Never mind, Emily, liberals will still always have 69ing.  Remember, in ConservoWorld, you either kneel or are kneeled to…

Re: Rep. Bachus:

As a friend of mine says, you can’t spell Bachus without HUAC BS.

People with free time are dangerous to an authoritarian government. Closely watched, strictly regimented leisure is much less dangerous. Leisure was promoted not because it’s good for people—if that goal were an end in itself then that might be socialism—but because leisure would help Germans work harder and fight harder for the Nazi party and the state.

Same principle for a lot of the Nazi window-dressing.  Watch Triumph of the Will sometime.  it’s not just a brilliant piece of propaganda and a demonstration that Reifenstahl was, whatever her faults, one hell of a filmmaker, but it’s a window into that strategy.  The first part of the film, especially, when they show the kids basically doing a big Hitlerjugend jamboree.  They’re out having fun, exercising, playing sports, learning useful things, you know, stuff that is good for kids anywhere.  All, in the end, to pump out thesoldiers who would die like dogs on the Russian steppes.

Apparently any time more than one person owns something, its ‘collective ownership’ and is just one step away (if that) from the government controlling everything.

I wonder if this Libertarian is married or every plans to be.  I wonder how he or she would feel about owning property jointly with their spouse.

Silly catgirl.  Libertarians OWN their spouses - just another piece of property they’ve acquired because they’re all wonderful Galtian go-getters, you know.