This is, in part, what Salon wrote:
Truth be told, though, for the most part conservatives haven't actually been using the words in such a way as to lend themselves to double entendre. With one or two exceptions, almost all of it has actually been coming from the left, which seems to have adopted the joke en masse during an earlier round of these protests back in February. After many hours of investigative journalism -- the kind that makes you wish you'd just gone to law school instead -- I think I've traced the meme's birth back to February 27th, when blogs like Instaputz and Wonkette started using it independently of one another. They were inspired by a photo that the Washington Independent's David Weigel shot of one protester carrying a sign that was, if you knew that second meaning, pretty funny: "Tea bag the liberal Dems before they tea bag you !!" (sic).
Since then, the left has used it so often, that Oxford added it to their dictionary.
Here's how various lefty websites covered this event. The Huffington Post:
Keith Olbermann took credit for popularizing the word on MSNBC Tuesday night. But the word "teabagger" actually started to spread after the Washington Independent's David Weigel photographed a protester at the first D.C. Tea Party Protest in February holding the sign, "Tea Bag the Liberal Dems Before They Tea Bag You!!"
It actually wasn't Keith, but Rachel. Although you have to give Keith credit for copping to it.
What Mediaite wrote:
Their definition doesn’t touch upon any of the raunchier, more testicular connotations of the word, which Keith Olbermann and Anderson Cooper had a lot of fun with in April. Cooper can take a lot of credit for the popularization of the phrase: in response to David Gergen’s questions about the Republican Party’s abilities to organize and articulate a message, Cooper infamously quipped, “It’s hard to talk when you’re teabagging.”‘
And, just to make sure you can read the original Oxford posting, click on it for the details.
