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.)

Facts: OK, we admit to initially being stumped by McCain’s assertion that the bailout plan, for which he suspended his campaign and went to Washington to urge lawmakers to pass, was secretly helping terrorist organizations. (Transitively, does that mean that McCain was supporting terrorist organizations? Of course not.)

But there is a possible indirect link between the bailout plan for bad mortgages and terrorism. This from Diane Francis of The National Post in Canada:

In fact, an Assyrian news website carried a story back in mid-2007 that FBI and other officials were concerned about a “growing trend of terrorist associations [involved] with mortgage fraud rings in the U.S.”
“In the past year [2007], several high-profile mortgage fraud arrests have been tied to federal terrorism investigations, most notably a ring busted up in Salt Lake City that is alleged to have direct ties to the late al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” said the story.
Money was obtained from banks fraudulently then transferred to Middle Eastern bank accounts controlled by terrorists. These cases grind through courts.

The Assyrian news story began:

A man arrested in December at the Kansas City airport with $70,000 in his bulging pockets while trying to board a Southwest Airlines flight claiming the money was actually Muslim prayer books, a San Francisco mortgage company executive who went on the run from the FBI in November, seven people arrested in September in Salt Lake City with ties to al-Qaeda, and a co-defendant in the Sami al-Arian/Palestinian Islamic Jihad trial all have one thing in common — the growing trend of terrorist associations with mortgage fraud rings in the US.

(It must be pointed out that the Assyrian account lists Al-Arian co-defendant Sameeh Hammoudeh as part of this great mortgage fraud terrorism effort, a gross misrepresentation of the mortgage fraud charge he pleaded to in court. His fraud charges related to his concealment of his employment at the Islamic Academy, and not fraud in subprime mortgages. Oh, and Hammoudeh was not a terrorist, either.)

The UK, likewise, has suspicions that terrorists used bad mortgages:

An intelligence report by the Association of Chief Police Officers said that organised crime groups used mortgage fraud to generate income and launder money from the proceeds of their operations, such as drugs, human trafficking and prostitution.

“While there is no evidence to suggest mortgage fraud directly funds terrorist acts, this area of criminality has been encountered during investigations into UK-based terrorist groups,” it said. “Mortgage fraud can be used to finance infrastructure including safe houses.”

Given this tenuous link to terrorism (if that is indeed what McCain was referring to) and misimpression that either the bailout or Wall Street aided terrorists, we judge this statement to be Bullshit.

• Bush signs the government’s big mortgage bailout bill.
• McCain suddenly remembers he’s a Republican, decides tax increases aren’t on the table after all.
• Alaska Senator Ted Stevens (R) sees his career slide further down the tubes.
• A whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.
• Oil prices drop 16% in July.
• New drug to treat Alzheimer’s disease stops the disease in its tracks … maybe.
• Ex basketball ref Tim Donaghy foul’s out for 15 months after rigging NBA games.
• Don’t hurt the robot’s feelings.

• Nick of time: Congress acts to remedy the mortgage crisis.
• Alan Greenspan: “We are on the brink.”
• A new documentary on Lee Atwater has conservatives crying foul.
• The IRS opens an investigation of local firebrand Bill Keller. The preacherman cries “Romney!”
• Oh good, Imus is shooting his mouth off again. I had gone months without hearing moronic, racist drivel.
• Bet you don’t know how much oil there is in the world. Turns out, no one does.
• George Carlin’s final interview, a wide-ranging, bittersweet affair, pops up on the Psychology Today’s website. Plus: HBO plans a Carlin marathon and WBAI looks back at history.
• The Mullet drops his cushy ESPN job to become coach the Lightning.