It's going to be fun watching the wingnut outrage machine gets spun up over this (emphasis mine):
In Jonathan Alter’s “The Promise: President Obama, Year One,” President Obama is quoted in an interview saying that the unanimous vote of House Republicans vote against the stimulus bills “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.”
Some will no doubt howl that by using the term "tea-baggers," President Obama was mocking the right-wing freakshow, but let it be said for the record that it was the freakshow itself that chose the teabag as its symbol. Nobody forced them to do it.
And when you have a clown like Rep. Phil Gingrey appear on Fox on April 9, 2009 holding two teabags aloft -- one in each hand -- and boasting "I've got my teabags here, you'll have pick your brand," you can't really blame those of us on the left for having a bit of a chuckle at their expense.
If any teabagger out there is truly offended that the teabag is the symbol of their movement, they shouldn't have started using it in the first place -- as early as February and March of 2009. And they certainly shouldn't blame the late Saul Alinksy, because no matter how powerful Michele Bachmann may imagine him to be, there's no way anything that he wrote forced a grown man like Phil Gingrey to brag about waving his teabags in the air.