Mike, you are quoting yourself in your own blog post? You came up with a great quip, but there's no need to go third-person on yourself.

The article starts like this:

The tea party in Lafayette Park in Washington, across from the White House, is under way, and Salon's Mike Madden is there covering the Tax Day protest.

and has the byline:

― Mike Madden, Katharine Mieszkowski

which I read to mean that Mieszkowski is writing this and telling us what Madden sent via Twitter. Which is what the headline on the main page says also.

Um

Am I the only one who immediately thought of something else when I saw the word "teabaggers"??

Aside from a week of jokes on Rachael Maddow, not to mention the rest of (non-right-wing) cable shows, and pretty much the whole progressive blogosphere, you mean?

Short answer: No ;)

This one was pretty good, from earlier on Salon's front page:

http://open.salon.com/blog/mortimer_hayden_smyth/2009/04/15/teabagging_and_beyond

Isn't it enough

Joking about the "teabagging" already? Both the Daily Show and Maddow could only find 1 clip of someone (a Faux News guy) calling it that. I think that weeks of tittering over the sexual connotations of the term isn't exactly winning over the independent voter.

Well, you'd be wrong then because Pew's latest survey shows independents highly approving of Barack Obama, and those calling themselves Republicans shrinking to an almost negligible 20-something percent. It's not the Democrats who need to worry about winning the independent voters, it's quite the opposite.

That is, the extremists who are what remains of the GOP should be the ones worried about it, not to mention GOP moderates who should worry even more, because they're losing independents fast. And ill-conceived stunts orchestrated by Fox and billionaires that make no sense are partly why.

Thanks for that clip, BobbyG. Taibbi never dissapoints, this part just nails it:

"Beck has an audience that’s been trained that the rich are not appropriate targets for anger, unless of course they’re Hollywood liberals, or George Soros, or in some other way linked to some acceptable class of villain, to liberals, immigrants, atheists, etc. — Ted Turner, say, married to Jane Fonda.

But actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit."

It's the serf mentality, which is partly why I always figure they love talking about "the Lord" so much, considering that the term itself comes directly from that pre-englightenment era. When people knew their place.

As has been just pointed out, these are libertarians and Ron Paul Republicans, not Bushies. If you gave a shit about attempting to understand your world, you would make better be able to comprehend the distinction.

Oh so these were the legions of libertarians and "Ron Paul Republicans" who were marching in rallies against the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan?

The post you were responding to asked why these people protest now, and didn't then. Your response that they're "not Bushies" was a non-sequitur and didn't even address the question.

So much for comprehension.

conflating Sarkozy with "the French" in the old freedom fries sense is misinformed. Anyone who's on the progressive side at all in France, well most anyway, despises him as a right wing reactionary. Always have.

It's always been funny seeing right wingers in the US slam people like Sarkozy with all the French stereotypes when they really mean as their target someone more like Jospin the socialist, who Sarkozy considers an enemy beneath contempt. Sad that Salon falls into the same shallow pool of cliches, but then what should I expect from the zine that inflicts Paglia on the world every month.

Sarkozy praised the election of Obama at first because even a right winger in France knew what a disaster George Bush was, despite Sarkozy's embrace of things American. Once he saw that Obama was actually a moderate to progressive Democrat, that is, a reasonable and diplomatic leader who thinks that belligerence isn't always the way to show your manhood, he predictably lost respect to some degree.

Oh and the string of Jerry Lewis and etc jokes about France makes you sound about as idiotic as the French who know nothing about America except Jerry Lewis and George W Bush.

The French lost 1.4 million people in combat in World War One. 300,000 more civilians died.

To put that in perspective as a percentage of their population, that would be roughly like us now losing 16 million soldiers in a war.

I wonder how we'd feel about anyone calling us a "surrender prone" nation after something like that.

Furthering those vapid right-wing cliches, even as a joke, is beneath even Salon.