Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for March 30, 2010

Zonker will be right at home!

Indeed - look at the guy’s costume!

Love the red bozo nose!

Are all these references to “tea” and “grassroots” really talking about marijuana consumption? I can see why Zonker is interested.

What would Nate and Amy Harris have to say about this?

…voters are the man…

If they have no leadership why do they follow Rush & Palin so slavishly?????

No picking on Bozo, that’s just a standard clown nose. Bozo knew what he was doing.

Never trust anyone under 40.

Well noted, Sheik Yerbouti. Besides confusing their “grassroots” with marijuana, Zonker is drawn to the tea party’s loss of identity. “Leaders” and “the Man” stand for the responsible, adult self that they all renounce, The red-shirted “NO” in the third panel expresses a child’s necessary, first step towards identity. But like Rush and Palin, these tea-partiers revel in childishness. They won’t budge beyond that first step of protest against authority, because authority means responsibility and the end of childhood.

Where were these people when George W. Bush was wrecking the country? Snoozing in front of the TV?

I bet that most t-baggers voted for cheney and mcsame and are not crucial indie swing-voters! No one can even come up with stats on how they voted and since the ballots were secret anyone can lie to suit their agenda. But, somehow I can’t believe that there are t-baggers that voted to legalize pot or for the extreme leftist Libertarians. Oh, and back to taxes, so the debt is growing? If the tax rate is moved up by 1 or 2% how much revenue is generated? OR, perhaps we can cut a lot of the second largest budget drain, guess what it is?

Stick it to the man. Go back a week and head to Startbuck’s. the important thing to remember is that WE ALL HAVE GUNS. Might stop a few Senatorial broken windows if they shot back.

You know, some folks are incredibly stupid.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8593975.stm

Lao Tsu observed that the best leader is the one who isn’t noticed, the one who leads in such a way that when the work is done the people say “we did this ourselves!”

So… who’s actually leading the teabaggers?

“The man” is anyone in power, anyone with authority and control over “the people”. He was normally characterized by policemen, politicians and corporate executives. Never mind that all of “the man” are also part of “the people”.

Gary Trudeau is surpassing even the Mainstream Media’s ignorant contempt for the Tea Partyers, but then what would you expect from someone who has been a rich, liberal Washington insider for decades. Or to put it another way, Trudeau IS The Man.

@puddleglum1066:

An deep question, to be sure. Some speculation:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125296989

@Wildcard:

I followed your link to the NPR piece and it helped identify the red-nosed bozo wrapped in a flag scarf. Zonker has just met Glenn Beck! “Arguably no one is more outraged, paranoid, self-righteous, famous, and convinced of his enduring victimhood than Fox’s weepy circus clown.”

TEA Party NOT “teabagger”

(teabagger means something COMPLETELY different - ask around among your more “peculiar” friends if you REALLY want to know)

Taxed Enough Already

Yes - it’s an acronym!

I’ve got entirely NON-ignorant contempt for the teabaggers. When they’re actually FOR something, instead of whiny petulant “IdontLIIIIIIIIIKEit!!!” caterwauling, I’ll listen.

LeoAutodidact – I looked up “teabag” on urbandictionary.com. Yikes….

Fair is fair; “teapartier” it is.

Ravenswing: The Tea Partyers are FOR the Constitution, FOR limited government, FOR freedom. These things only look like negatives to Leftists who resent any obstacle to their dream of running every aspect of everyone’s lives.

Scaaty: Thanks for your fairness. Think what it says about the people who will gleefully continue using the insulting term while whining about alleged Tea Partyer “incivility”.

Susan001: The ice floes were supposed to kick in in 2018, but Al Gore convinced the Lefties there wouldn’t be any ice left by then. The good news is that the earth is cooling, so there will be plenty of ice floes for the Millennial generation to put the Baby Boomers on. But no Death Panels. :-)

There’s Enough A$$holes Already But There’s Always Room For Another G.O.P. Grandfather/Grandmother Evading Responsibility for GWB

Yes, it’s an acronym!

Those posters who rely on internet authorities like Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary need to be aware that their source is politically biased. To illustrate, here’s one of the definitons of “teabagger” from the Urban Dictionary: “A conservative republican who protests against income taxes by rubbing their nutsacks in each other’s faces. Senator David Vitter is a teabagger who wants to cut government programs during a recession.”

Zonker?? Fronting for the MAN?

How dare he!

I too am for the Constitution – I took an oath that “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; …”. I meant every word.

I’m also for freedom, and for limited government – although I imagine my notions about what the essential and proper roles of government are may be different from those in the Tea Party. That’s okay: honest, intelligent people may hold very different values.

Personally, I think that required reading for all sides should include the Declaration of Independence, if only to see where the Founding Fathers were coming from, and the U.S. Constitution and all of its amendments, if only to see where we are now.

My bottom line is that people – on both sides – who feel it necessary to shout down those they disagree with, and who fall back on slogans, insults, and name-calling, are using a part of their bodies other than their brains. I confess I have little patience with such.

palin drome: I went back to urbandictionary.com, and read the offered definitions of “teabagger”. (I had actually looked up “teabag”, and having read the first definition, saw no reason to read further. As I said: Yikes….) My apologies for my ignorance about the other usages.

That being said, both Wikipedia and urbandictionary.com have user-generated content, with little or no editorial control, so neither can be said to be politically biased. Wikipedia’s only concern is verifiable factual correctness, while urbandictionary.com will publish literally anything, no matter how slanderous or vile, because its only purpose is to record how people use slang expressions.

@SCAATY:

I’m with you in preferring Constitutional government. But what can one say to a group that loudly attacks the government in the name of a Constitution they haven’t read? If they did read it, they’d see that the Constitution lays out very clearly how to go about changing the government. But they’re too impatient to work on influencing the majority vote. They just want the instant gratification of getting noticed in the polls.

The TEA partyers make it too easy; this strip summarizes their silliness, incoherence, irrational paranoia and fear mixed with a huge dollop of intellectual dishonesty and misinformation; egged-on by the know nothings of the wacko right-wing (Glenn Beck) and encouraged by the do-nothing-always-say-no republicans.

With regards to the term “tea-bag” and its variants…

It has always been my understanding that this is a gamer term and has nothing political about it. Sure, political groups may have adopted it, but (as one who rarely uses Wikipedia and never uses the Urban Dictionary) I have long known what it means.

The definition that palin drome quotes differs from the meaning that I know primarily in that it is aimed at a specific political party.

In the gaming community, teabagging refers to one who does an emote which resembles the action described in palin drome’s quote to the “dead” avatar of another player… usually one which the teabagger had “killed” in player vs player action.

I understand that some people would use such a derogatory term deliberately… and that is what I thought was the case with those who call the T.E.A. Party “Teabaggers.”

/\ Getting noticed is right on. Without a TV camera they are nothing.

It is really amusing to see so many of the posters give credence to the “Tea Party”, or “Teabaggers”, or whatever the heck they’re called. Oh, these people are going to make a lot of noise, and might even inspire some nutcase to do something “heroic” (e.g.: Timothy McVeigh). However, as authentic revolutionaries throughout history well knew, pulling off a successful revolution is not an easy thing at all. Trust me: two years from now (at most) the “Tea Party” movement is going to be nothing more than a very minor footnote in history – replaced by some other ineffective “movement du jour”.

Hummm…

The tea parties must be having some effect judging by all of the attention being paid to them by the liberal media…

It’s already inspired some Christian Jihadis to try to kill a few cops in the Detroit area – thankfully they got caught, but it won’t be the end.

Actually, the Tea Party Movement is nothing more or less than ordinary Americans who are sick & tired of higher taxes, more Govt. regulations & interference in their daily lives, and they want politicians to know it! They are not, in ANY sense of the word, “radicals,” unless “radical” means wanting more freedom to live your own life. Btw, GT, not ONE time have I heard of members of the Tea Party movement say anything LIKE, “Join us! Join us! Or die!”