The Political Whore

Are we witnessing the birth of a new Lou Dobbs, or is the viral emergence of Rick Santelli on the mortgage assistance plan just a casw of the upper-class twits being openly pissed at the lower-class dummies?

Or is it worse: another example of how Web 2.0 endlessly recycles anything that has the same rubber-necking appeal as a good interstate highway car crash? (Let’s not forget that some of the most consistently popular online videos features kitties.)

By now it is pretty safe to say you cannot have missed the hubub about CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli inducing a “riot” on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. OK, it wasn’t a riot, it was a few traders who are doing OK financially, as is Santelli, all bitching about the mortgage assistance plan announced by President Barack Obama this week.

Viral Video Chart says the Santelli Tea Party clip has been added to 255 blogs (256 as soon as I hit the publish button) and had more than 220,000 views in the past day.

Let’s go to the video for those who missed it and those who can’t get enough of it.

The Columbia Journalism Review, natch, displays its disapproval:

Yesterday, modern-day patriot and CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli shed his reporter’s hat to reveal a hat he had long been wearing underneath, presumably for warmth: that of “veteran trader and financial executive.” He tried to start a riot on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, and got about three traders to join his battle against the clique of crony homeowners who have been swindling our nation’s honest bankers for far too long. President Obama’s proposed housing bill proved to be the straw that broke this camel’s back, and Santelli decided to rail against the creeping Cubafication of America.

This morning, NBC, like an embarrassed parent who drags his kid over to the neighbor’s to apologize for the broken window, trotted out Santelli to explain himself for his “impassioned talk.” Santelli, however, had clearly been galvanized by what guest anchor Brian Williams called the most e-mailed moment “in the Web universe.” Straining with rage, Santelli screamed down anyone else who tried to speak or state facts, especially if that someone was senior economics report Steve Liesman, who began by correcting Santelli on a key point: “First of all, Rick, they’re not lowering the principal amount of the loan. That’s just wrong.”

That set off a five-minute twister with Liesman, Williams, and Matt Lauer struggling to play the handler to the rampaging Santelli, who managed to hit every talking point in the objective reporter’s playbook: activist judges, evil government “legislating your choice away,” the God of the market mechanism, the appeal to private charity to save us (we haven’t, um, tried that somewhere else, have we?), playing up the tragedy that is poor Lauer’s decimated 401k, and the classic won’t-somebody-please-think-of-the-children line: “There’s a lot of zeroes in trillions,” he wheezed. “Aren’t you worried about your kids and your grandkids?” (Your kids, obviously, not those bum kids whose bum parents aren’t making payments on the exploding mortgages they bought from all those clean-cut bankers.)

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