Oh ... That's What That Means: Fox News Learns the Definition of 'Teabagging'
Foxnews.com has published a screed taking the mainstream media to task for their "orally charged" coverage of the tea parties: Namely, the repeated use of the term "teabagging" for giggles.
As we've noted, CNN's Anderson Cooper and MSNBC's David Shuster and Rachel Maddow have been having been saying "teabagging" a lot—over and over and over again!—in reference to yesterday's attempt by Fox News and its slackjawed audience to re-enact Mike Judge's 2006 film Idiocracy at festivals nationwide (think of it as their Rocky Horror Picture Show).
"What's with all this 'teabagging' business?" Fox News wondered. "They're saying that word an awful lot." After some investigating, Fox came to understand that CNN and MSNBC haven't been shooting straight—the word "teabag" carries with it subtle mockery when used by pointy-headed liberals conversant in the coded language of sexual perversity!
Teabagging, for those who don't live in a frat house, refers to a sexual act involving part of the male genitalia and a second person's face or mouth.
WHAT PART!?!?!?
"I've never seen anything like it," Bozell said. "The oral sex jokes on (CNN) and particularly MSNBC on teabagging ... they had them by the dozens. That's how insulting they were toward people who believe they're being taxed too highly."
Yes, a bunch of anchors employed a double entrende to mock a mindless farce. (Why not watch the video compilation we posted yesterday, at right, one more time?) But let's remember why it's funny. Simply picking a sexually suggestive phrase and using it to describe the tea parties is not, in and of itself, funny. What makes it funny is this: The reason people call it "teabagging" is that the idiots at Fox News started calling it "teabagging" themselves without understanding that they were using a word that, in another context, means gently sucking on somebody's testicles. Now that is funny, and Maddow pointed it out in her April 9 broadcast, with video of a Fox Newser saying, "teabag the fools in D.C.!"
But Fox does get one thing kind of right, in reference to Maddow's buddy act with Gawker Media alumna Ana Marie Cox:
If anyone thinks the orally charged remarks on mainstream cable were just a coincidence, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow's segments over the past week with guest, Air America's Ana Marie Cox, would dissolve all doubt. Their on-air gymnastics, dancing around the double entendre of the week, looked like live-action Beavis and Butthead.
They're both very pretty ladies! But Maddow does kind of have a Beavis Butthead thing going on, doesn't she?