Jake Tapper has now updated his post noting that that “tea bagger” was originally the chosen name of the Tea Partiers themselves. It’s also true of course that long after many Tea Partiers decided they could probably use a better name for themselves that many anti-Tea Partiers continued to use the word as a form of mockery or derision.
There’s even an intra-Tea Party debate over whether they should simply embrace the “tea bagger” label as a form of group solidarity and pride, much as other marginalized or groups that imagine they’re marginalized have embraced labels of derision in the past (Christian, Puritan, N—er, Queer, etc.)
After holding to the “tea bagger” label for a while here at TPM, I eventually made the decision to have our preferred term be “tea partier” simply because I think it’s best to call people what they want to be called, absent any compelling reasons to the contrary.
That said, it is hard to say that anyone’s been treated very unfairly. If a brash new political protest group had come on the scene audaciously announcing themselves as the “d–k l–kers” — oblivious to the slang meaning of the phrase — it seems like it would be expecting too much of their political opponents not to have a touch of fun at their expense, even after they’d realized their error in branding and come up with another name for the club.
