Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow, MSNBC: 'Teabagger'

Rachel Maddow interviewed Jon Stewart on her MSNBC program last night.

They talked about the Left and the Right and the "humor" of using the vulgar term "teabagger" to describe members of the Tea Party movement.

Stewart chastised Maddow and her MSNBC colleagues for running a marathon with the alleged "joke" rather than letting it go quickly.

Video.



Transcript, from NewsBusters:

RACHEL MADDOW, HOST: The caricature of the Left being as vociferous as the right is something that…

JON STEWART: I don't think that's the caricature of the Left. I really don't. I think the caricature of the Left is one that is slightly that -- that – they use as a cudgel. Didn't you hate when the Republicans used to use the phrase Democrat. Democrat.

MADDOW: The Democrat Party. Has the word rat in it.

STEWART: It seemed dickish. Democrat Party. Or when you spoke out against the war, there was a subtle undertone of you're un-American, you don't want to win the war on terror. Well, I think that what also comes out sometimes from the other side is teabagger. Now that’s I think derogatory. And I don't think anybody would mistake it for that, for anything other than that. And it's been used on this network quite frequently, by hosts, by guests…

MADDOW: You don't think it was funny that they were calling them, they were saying tea bag the White House before the White House tea bags you?

STEWART: I thought it was funny for a day. I thought it was funny for a day.

MADDOW: Funny enough to play the John Waters clip of the teabagging thing on a bar?

STEWART: For a day. Probably wouldn't have run with it with guests and things for months.

MADDOW: I didn't run it for months.

STEWART: No, but your part…

MADDOW: But I got criticized for it for months.

STEWART: Well, because you kind of made hay of it. You made more hay of it than maybe that, you know, that…

MADDOW: Took the joke too far.

So, as Noel Sheppard points out:

Maddow was exposing the really inconvenient truth about what she and Keith Olbermann do that separates them from serious journalists: they take the joke too far.

More than that, they're often going for the joke rather than the story thereby making it difficult to take them seriously.

...And therein likely lies the real problem for both Maddow and Olbermann: in trying to inject humor into their reporting, they've both become farcical caricatures of newscasters that can't possibly be taken seriously.

As much as they want to be considered as journalists, they also strive to be Jon Stewart. By contrast, he just sees himself as a satirist commenting on the day's events with as much humor as possible.

The "teabagger" exchange between Stewart and Maddow reveals a lot about the sort of "journalism" practiced at MSNBC.

Going for the joke isn't what hard news reporters do, or at least should do.

MSNBC employs standards held by Stewart, a comedian and satirist and entertainer.

This display of cluelessness on the part of Maddow comes at an especially inconvenient time, given her recent ranting about FOX News being a political operation whereas the stellar credentials and practices of MSNBC hosts and MSNBC prove them to be a news operation.

I give Stewart credit for calling out Maddow and her Leftist colleagues on the persistent and inappropriate use of the offensive term "teabagger."

Stewart thought it was funny for a day.

Even so, one wonders what this alleged "news operation" and these journalists were doing reveling in a "joke" at all.

What is MSNBC? Whatever it is, it's not a "news operation."

Some self-reflection and soul-searching on the part of Maddow and Keith Olbermann and the MSNBC brass are definitely in order.

They have an identity crisis.

____________________

Maddow, Olbermann, and the MSNBC operation are far from the only ones to utilize the slur.

Pundits, journalists, and elected officials adopted the vulgar term and embraced it with gusto to slime their fellow Americans.

Just a few examples:

JOHN CONYERS: But we're here now to understand the frustration of the teabaggers and the people that are angry, because many times when you're angry, your rational abilities are compromised. And you get mad at the wrong party or the wrong thing or whoever is the president.

...The facts are that many of the teabaggers that were hollering and being profane and screaming and using profanity-- Guess what? They are going to be beneficiaries, but they don't know it.

BILL MAHER: I thank the Teabaggers....

Any Teabaggers here tonight? They're the ones who got it passed. And I'm sure they're saying, 'What are you talking about, Bill? I was so against the health care bill I marched on Washington with tea bags hanging from my hat, dressed up in my Founding Fathers costume, with a picture of Hitler, you know, and Obama's face on him, and you know, screaming about his birth certificate.'

And America saw that and said, 'What loons! We're going with the calm black man.' These idiots can't even spell 'go back to Kenya,' you know.

JIM McDERMOTT: On my way to work this morning, I saw a group of teabaggers. And I'm really happy that they'll be in Washington to witness Congress pass the historic health care bill tomorrow. When I got to the office, I did a little research on my own and found the website of a teabagger group called the 9/12 Project....

MARK KNOLLER: Obama's motorcade arrives at Capitol Hill. Boos and jeers passing teabagger protests.

MIKE MALLOY: The latest from the crazy people in the tea bag movement is, uh, a story about, um, Virginia Thomas, she is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; and she's setting up a teabagger nonprofit group. Now this will be interesting because the teabaggers are essentially racist; and how are they're going to deal with a very dark Clarence Thomas and a very white Virginia Thomas setting up subdivision of their crazed teabagger party; how they're going to deal with that will be great fun to watch.

...[Virginia's] in for a big surprise, when the inherently racist nature of the teabagger movement slams her in the face. She's a very, very, very, very, very white Omaha, Nebraska woman married to a very, very, very, very black South Georgia man. And when the pictures of the two of them together get out, you can almost hear the squealing right now from the real teabaggers.

ROGER EBERT: TeaBagger crowd: polite. The nutjobs who were bussed to Town Halls didn't get their way paid to Sarah [Palin]'s $100,000 speech.

JOHN KERRY: We also see how revved up the teabaggers are at the thought of hijacking health care reform and every chance we have at making progress in Washington.

BARNEY FRANK: I, like you, am skeptical. They haven't shown the willingness to stand up to this intense Right-wing pressure and the fear of losing to the teabaggers in primaries.

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: The idea of a responsibility tax on these banks which have cost people jobs, homes. I think it's a test for the Teabaggers moving forward, too. Which side are they on? Are they on the side of the people as they claim?

CHUCK SCHUMER: Martha Coakley is running to fill the rest of Ted Kennedy's term, and her opponent is a far-right teabagger Republican.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Every single teabagger in America is white.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: So who will lead the teabaggers? Will it be Rick Perry down in Texas? Will it be Michele Bachman out in Minnesota? Will it be Sarah Palin? You first Mark [McKinnon] it's your idea. The teabaggers are an interesting group to watch. They're not far right. They're probably center-right, in fact some centrists. But they're generally, I think, Republican voters. Right? Is that fair to say? They vote Republican?

SUZANNE MALVEAUX: Do we expect to see the kinds of big rallies and the kind of- some of the theatrics, the circus atmosphere that we saw the last go-round over the summer when you were talking about controversial policy... Teabaggers and all that other thing?

CANDY CROWLEY: And by way of marquee races, it's hard to beat the soap opera of New York's 23rd congressional district, where the Republican moderate dropped out over the weekend, leaving the race to a conservative, Doug Hoffman, the choice of many on the right, including Sarah Palin, former House leader Dick Armey and tea bag partiers.

DAVID SHUSTER: For most Americans, Wednesday, April 15, will be Tax Day, but... it's going to be Teabagging Day for the right wing, and they're going nuts for it. Thousands of them whipped out the festivities early this past weekend, and while the parties are officially toothless, the teabaggers are full-throated about their goals. They want to give President Obama a strong tongue-lashing and lick government spending.

GWEN IFILL: So whether it's Jeremiah Wright or Henry Louis Gates, Jr., or what Jimmy Carter said about this, the Teabaggers or whoever, it's always going to be with us?

PAUL KRUGMAN: But the teabaggers have come and gone, as have the cries of 'death panels' and the demonstrations by Medicare recipients demanding that the government stay out of health care.

BILL CLINTON: The reason the teabaggers are so inflamed is because we are winning.

MAXINE WATERS: I want journalists to be all over those rallies and the marches with the birthers and the teabaggers.

OBAMA: Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care?

OBAMA: That helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.


E.J. DIONNE: The conservative party in New York state put up a Right-wing candidate supported by the teabaggers.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: This hardcore part of the base is in a world unto its own right now. The Teabag Movement and the others are sort of driven by the idea that President Obama and the Democrats have a secret plan to impose socialism.

KEITH OLBERMANN: Well, the teabagging is all over, except for the cleanup.

...Congratulations, Pensacola teabaggers. You got spunked. And despite the hatred on display, a few of you actually violated the penal code. But teabagging is now petered out, taint what it used to be. And when you co-opt the next holiday, Fourth of July, try to adopt a holiday food that does not invite the double entendres like, you know, franks and beans.

KEITH OLBERMANN: I wanted to apologize for calling Senator-elect Scott Brown an 'irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, tea-bagging, supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees.' I'm sorry, I left out the word 'sexist.'

JANEANE GAROFALO: This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks. And there is no way around that. And you know, you can tell these type of right wingers anything and they'll believe it, except the truth.

JANEANE GAROFALO: If there's any teabaggers here, welcome, and as always, white power.

ANA MARIE COX: Who wouldn't want to tea bag John McCain? This is all part of the midterm strategy. You know it's going to be teabagging 24/7 when it comes to the midterms.

RACHEL MADDOW: The GOP, in other words, is clearly in exile. But the conservative movement has found a reason to live, have found something about which they feel very positive about, something they are ready to rally around. I speak, of course, of teabagging.

...They don't want to teabag alone, if that's even possible. They want you to start teabagging, too.

ANDERSON COOPER: Teabagging. They've got teabagging.... It's hard to talk when you're teabagging.

That's a whole lot of ugly.

In Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter's book, The Promise: President Obama, Year One, we learn that even OBAMA actually uses the terribly foul term as well to describe his fellow Americans. That's really disgusting.

The term "tea-bagger" is like uttering the "n" word, some say. Though he aspires to promote civility, evidence has surfaced that President Obama has added "tea-bagger" to his public lexicon, though it's considered a cheap and tawdry insult by "tea party" activists. Watchdogs at Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) barked when they saw the proof, tucked in a sneak peak of Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter's new book, "The Promise: President Obama, Year One," to be released May 18. Indeed, it appears the president joined certain partisan critics and the liberal media, and took the tea-bag plunge.

...The offending passage that started the tea-bagger shuffle? Mr. Alter wrote, "Obama said that the unanimous House vote against the Recovery Act 'set the tenor for the whole year': 'That helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.' "

Mr. Obama himself was recently ruing the contentious state of politics, noting Saturday at a college commencement speech, "We've got politicians calling each other all sorts of unflattering names. Pundits and talking heads shout at each other. The media tends to play up every hint of conflict, because it makes for a sexier story."

What a hypocrite!

Like Maddow and Olbermann and the others, does Obama also suffer from an identity crisis?

Are they all striving to be Jon Stewart?

If they are, they belong on Comedy Central.