"Embrace with ridicule the language of the oppressor"? You make me sound like some Judith Butler acolyte, honey! I just hope people pick up on your irony. :)

And thanks for the link.

I'm not a fan of it, I think it's childish and classless for CNN, MSNBC and the rest of the leftist/media industrical complex to use it, but.....
Since we're doing the tea-bagging, that means the pols and their Minitru allies are the tea-baggees.

So it's lame, classless, childish and self-defeating.

Today it seems that the groups in power or wanting power state that they are in the informed intelligent position and that all others are of marginal intelligence and therefore not valid.
The theory is I guess if you tell the same lie enough times the majority will believe you.

This baffles me about the postwar generations: despite the long established sexual revolution, sex scandals stick and anti-homosexual slurs are flung without embarassment.

Brett, I don't think this is particularly an example of an "anti-homosexual" slur. Whatever social revolutions may happen, I think human beings are always going to use sexual associations to trivialize things as intellectually undemanding or poorly thought out. I'm not saying it's fair to go around assuming that anyone built for sensuality isn't built for more intellectually demanding pursuits, but in my experience it's something that happens across cultures. Even in this day and age, buxom gals and jockish-looking guys can get sick and tired of getting double-takes when people find out they have degrees in bioengineering. Extraordinarily beautiful actors often feel the need to scuff themselves up and take down-at-heel roles in order to be taken seriously as technicians.

So I don't think that there's anything explicitly anti-gay going on here; there's just no obvious hetero slang related to tea (unless my friends are holding out on me). I will say that I think the left is being kind of hypocritical, though. If a bunch of social-democratic types started a movement called, say, the Coalition for Better Jobs, and conservatives started scoffingly calling them "the BJ Coalition"? Tell me there wouldn't be squawking from Cambridge to Irvine.

Sean, Judith Butler used to be the chair of the UC Berkeley Rhetoric Department -- where I got my undergraduate degree. (I hope this isn't an admission against my interest....) So if I did make you sound like her acolyte (which you could never be as your prose is far too comprehensible), it would probably have been projection!

LOL. When I was an undergrad at Penn, I worked with someone who'd been in grad school with Butler ("back when she was Judy Butler," she said wryly). My colleague was too well bred to voice any explicit judgment about Butler's literal and figurative academic theatrics--though her low opinion was perfectly obvious between the lines--but she was at pains to point out that Butler isn't a poseur in the usual sense. Which is to say, she actually reads deeply and knows what she's talking about; the obfuscatory language is an affectation, but it's not something she needs in order to disguise her ignorance. I'm not sure whether that makes her a more or less sympathetic figure.