About Those Tea Bags . . .

So the right wing nutjobs, whipped into a frenzy by their corporatocratic handlers, are piqued about all the teabagging jokes.

You know, it's just those Muslim-homosexual-socialist-liberal pre-verts and their dirty minds, trying to demean a sacred re-enactment of that great moment in American history, Boston Tea Party.

Thing is though, the teabaggers deserve it. And one of the reasons why is that their great symbol, the tea bag, has nothing to do with the Boston Tea Party.

I thought I remembered from my high school American history class that protesters in 1773 threw chests of tea into Boston harbor, not chests of tea bags. But hey, that class was over 20 years ago, back when I was thinking about girls and where we were going to get booze for the weekend, so maybe I remembered wrong.

Nope. Colonists dumped chests full of loose-leaf tea into the harbor. Here's some info on one of the surviving chests.

Tea bags weren't invented until 1903.

So as I see it you have no reason to complain about teabagging jokes if you're all about tea bags and there weren't any at the Boston Tea Party. It's as if there were once something called the Philadelphia Tuba Party, in which angry Philadelphians threw imported tubas into the sea, you emulated it by dumping not tubas but another member of the brass family, and then got mad when everyone made rusty trombone jokes.

"But it's a symbol!!! It's symbolic!!!"

As George Carlin said, I prefer to leave symbols to the "symbol-minded."

And that's why the symbol-minded right wing teabaggers deserve all the teabag jokes they get.