Tea Party Snark II: Cooper At 8, Boorish Definitions, Twitscoop Bullsh*t

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Filed Under (News, Outrage) by Ben Grivno on 16-04-2009

A continuing series covering snarky, condescending and inappropriate liberal response to the Tea Party Movement. Snark I | Snark III First Greg Gutfeld at BigHollywood brilliantly takes on Anderson Cooper’s tasteless teabagging shtick: 
Now, if you`re too old or too high to get what`s going on, here`s the joke: The liberal-leaning media are goofing on the tea parties by invoking the term teabagging, a phrased used to describe an act of oral sex performed by a man – either on another man, woman, or in Alec Baldwin’s case – a cheeseburger. And so you have Cooper`s joke – it`s just a shame he ripped off the shtick from David Shuster, who apparently has never met a joke he hasn`t beat to death like a hunter on a harp seal. On MSNBC, Shuster repeats testicle-based puns with a fervent relish not unlike an eight-year old boy who just can’t stop sniffing his fingers. And, this, coming from me. I`m mean – I always thought I was the king of obvious jokes, but I relinquish that crown – because the real obvious joke is Shuster.
4/17 Edit: Commenter BB brings up an excellent point. Gutfeld was being just as rude and crass as Cooper when he snarks at Alec Baldwin and he goes to far when he describes the 8 year old “who just can’t stop sniffing his fingers.” In retrospect, it was poorly chosen on my part – though comparing Cooper’s behavior to that of an 8 year old boy is quite apt. ********** The callow behavior continues at DailyKos as Kos-hack Greg Dworkin spits up some unseemly Urban Dictionary definitions:
Teabagger n. A conservative activist who is so ignorant that they protest against tax cuts (that benefit them) by throwing tea into a river. Teabagging: The mornic [sic] act of conservatives/Republicans sending used teabags to lawmakers because they think Obama is a Nazi.
Uhhh. How… unclever. The Chairman of Urban Dictionary’s Bipartisan Committee for the Prevention of Vulgar Behavior could not be reached for comment. Dworkin continues by cluelessly claiming that the Tea Party had no buzz on Twitter because Twitscoop‘s tag cloud didn’t show any tea party related words:  
Dworkin's Twitscoop Screenshot

Dworkin's Twitscoop Screenshot

Riiight, because the fact that the #teaparty hashtag stayed at the top of Twitter‘s “Trending Topics” nearly all day means NOTHING! It’s still #3 as of 10:35 AM EST 4/16/2009 – that means nothing too. Perhaps Dworkin should have read Twitscoop’s explanation of their tag cloud:
Through an automated algorithm, twitscoop crawls hundreds of tweets every minute and extracts the words which are mentioned more often than usual. The result is displayed in a Tag Cloud, using the following rule: the hotter, the bigger(no joke here). 
Someone please tell Dworkin that words are not necessarily hashtags. Gee – ya think Twitscoop might be filtering out the hashtags??? Could it be that Twitscoop isn’t the best indicator of overall buzz? “Bullshit” is also listed as a trend in Dworkin’s TwitScoop screenshot – how appropriate.