Teabaggers, mullahs brothers under the skin

Yesterday, I posted a column on examiner.com about Geico firing Lance Baxter for having the temerity to express his displeasure about their tactics to a teabagger organization. I used the term teabagger. Just like that. No quotes.

I was instantly attacked by teabaggers. At first, it appeared in the stats available to me that 27 of 33 readers had made comments, 26 negative and one positive.

In the light of day, it turns out that the column received so many hits that it landed in the top five of examiner.com’s hundreds of blogs for the day.

Nonetheless, that does not overturn my decision to quit writing for examiner.com.

Firstly, the site has become increasingly right wing.

Secondly, I was asked to use quotes around the word teabagger if I used it in future. Teabagger is an English word. It means someone who fills little sacks of paper with crushed tea leaves. Apparently, it also has other meanings, meanings I was not aware of―not hanging out with the lowest of the nation’s teenagers―when I first used the term in print…as does everyone else up to and including Huffington Post and the New York Times. But I refuse to be intimidated by the terrorism of mental midgets.

Thirdly, I am so sick and tired of pandering to the cockamamie political correctness demands of people with sick minds and sicker spirits that I’m more than happy to shift my attentions to my own website/blog, where I can do as I please. Mind you, there are terms that are disgusting and demeaning in all contexts that I will not use. The N word is one. The C word is another…although I hasten to add, that is basically a societal expectation. British comedian Frankie Boyle uses the C word in reference to women all the time and no one thinks anything of it. It’s locker room humor, and he is a locker room humorist, although he is generally using that humor to point up real ills in British society.

I am often, in England, treated to the phrase, “took the Mick out of him/her.” It did surprise me the first time I heard it, being a Mick myself and realizing that in America, only other Micks will use Mick, as only African-Americans will use the N word among themselves. And, as I would imagine, other ethnic people would use the pejorative terms among themselves. It comes down to, “I can call my mother names, but you can’t.”

Fair enough.

But what about Mick in England? After all, the Brits subjugated the Irish for quite a long time. Ah, sure then isn’t it just a wee wordeen we’re speaking about? Isn’t it just another way to say a person was having a bit of fun? I customarily call my husband a Limey…which we have fun with because he has a Gin and Tonic every single night with, naturally, a slice of lime in it. I don’t think he’d drink it without the slice of lime. Granted, the term came about because British sailors ate limes at sea to prevent scurvy. That was pretty smart, yes? It could even be argued, on that basis, that Limey is an honorific word for a Brit.

But back to teabaggers. I seriously doubt that more than a handful of them really care about the sexual connotations of the term. Surely, unless they were courting discord from the outset (and that is possible), they didn’t know the other term when they started taping teabags to their hats and carrying signs with racial and gender insults on them, not to mention hurling same at members of Congress about to vote for Mr. Obama’s health care bill. But, true to any terrorist organization, when they found that they had a weapon to use, even if that weapon was ludicrously unallied with anything substantive in question, they pounced upon it like it was a hoard of GOP gold, and are (please excuse mixed metaphors) milking it for every ounce of mileage they can get out of it against any person or organization who will bow down and kiss their mud-splattered feet.

I don’t care for the taste of mud. I don’t care for the teabaggers. I also don’t care if they pray over me for my own good, as they put it, so that I might better come to the realization that they are right. When, in my examiner.com column’s comments, I noted that praying for someone without asking permission is hostile and arrogant (how do they know what my religion or beliefs might be, or anyone’s?), they accused me of not being polite, of rejecting a kindness.

If they were interested in polite, why didn’t they ask me if I’d like to be prayed over? If they were interested in kindness, why did they threaten me with more mayhem when, by removing my column, I denied them the opportunity to hijack it for their own purposes?

In the same way, they tore Lance Baxter apart through both character and career assassination, and at the end of their maneuvers, they wished him a nice day. (Please click here to see a video of how Baxter handled it.)

The Hallmarking of America is complete! On another day, I’ll investigate the ludicrous habit of telling everyone you speak with on the phone every time you do so that you love them. My own stepdaughter told me once that it was because that person might die without knowing how you felt. Frankly, if people you love don’t pretty much know how you feel, one tossed off “love ya” won’t cut it. They’d better know by your deeds and behavior toward them. And if you don’t love them, then it’s bogus and unethical to begin with. But, as I said, that’s a subject for another day.

I can assure you that when the teabaggers threatened to paper the Internet with screen shots of my column (which I took down to avoid complying with a directive I regard as bogus in both an editorial and ideological sense) and the comments (which I also took down), and topped it off with a prayer, they were in no way interested in my spiritual health or immortal soul. What they were interested in, plain and simple, was intimidating me to get their own way. A way they have arrogantly decided, like so many neoNazis (another term to which they object all the while behaving like Nazis and not being smart enough to see it), is the one true way.

The one true way, as I see it, is to firmly and unerringly stand up to bullies and terrorists, whether they are a bunch of retirees with too much taxpayer money in their pockets, too much time on their hands and too little brain in their heads, or Islamic clerics issuing fatwas.

As they say in Brooklyn, same difference.