Hey, remember that time Rick Santelli lost his mind on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade and started screaming something about not bailing out “losers” who couldn’t pay their mortgages with mortgage assistance program, but it’s okay to drop nearly however many trillion we’ve spent so far bailing out the financial industry, and it was all spontaneous and the people cheered for him? What if I told you it wasn’t really all that spontaneous? Okay, you’d laugh. But what if an actual reporter said that?
Playboy (of all places) seems to have broken the story, but since most of you read from work, I won’t link directly to it. You’re welcome. Instead, I’ll link somewhere that links to the original, and it’ll just be our little secret. From Ritholtz:
“How did a minor-league TV figure, whose contract with CNBC is due this summer, get so quickly launched into a nationwide rightwing blog sensation? Why were there so many sites and organizations online and live within minutes or hours after his rant, leading to a nationwide protest just a week after his rant?
[...]
“Within hours of Santelli’s rant, a website called ChicagoTeaParty.com sprang to life. Essentially inactive until that day, it now featured a YouTube video of Santelli’s “tea party” rant and billed itself as the official home of the Chicago Tea Party. The domain was registered in August, 2008 by Zack Christenson, a dweeby Twitter Republican and producer for a popular Chicago rightwing radio host Milt Rosenberg—a familiar name to Obama campaign people. Last August, Rosenberg, who looks like Martin Short’s Irving Cohen character, caused an outcry when he interviewed Stanley Kurtz, the conservative writer who first “exposed” a personal link between Obama and former Weather Undergound leader Bill Ayers. As a result of Rosenberg’s radio interview, the Ayers story was given a major push through the Republican media echo chamber, culminating in Sarah Palin’s accusation that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.” That Rosenberg’s producer owns the “chicagoteaparty.com” site is already weird—but what’s even stranger is that he first bought the domain last August, right around the time of Rosenburg’s launch of the “Obama is a terrorist” campaign. It’s as if they held this “Chicago tea party” campaign in reserve, like a sleeper-site. Which is exactly what it was.
Personally, my favorite part is where Santelli was called minor-league. Except for that time he found a toupee, I had never heard of the guy before this. He’s like the midday news anchor on the Toledo ABC affiliate. He’s as close to nobody as you can be and still be on TV.
Then all this comes along and suddenly he’s the biggest thing to hit Youtube since the “In My Butt” guy. Except Santelli’s rant seems to have been a plant, making Santelli himself a plant, and now Jim Cramer is only the second-biggest fail on CNBC.
(h/t to Toi, who only reads it for the articles)
RobT // Feb 28, 2009 at 10:19 pm
I don’t know about all these Jim Cramer insults. He is the Crazy Cat Lady of cnbc – you have to appreciate him for what he is.
Jason // Feb 28, 2009 at 10:22 pm
He’s entertaining, I just wish CNBC would run a disclaimer at the bottom of the screen whenever he is on that says “DO NOT DO THIS”
alyx // Mar 1, 2009 at 3:44 pm
For me the oddest thing about the Santelli rant was that I saw it that morning and didn’t think much of it because that is kind of how the Chicago floor guys are — but then a couple hours *after* it had actually happened, Drudge made it his top OMG BREAKINGNEWS story, with sirens and alarm bells.
It seemed like a *manufactured* big deal, but what story isn’t, I guess. I dunno that I think it’s a plant, but I do know that I don’t think the buzz around it was completely organic, and whether Santelli had anything to do with that or not, I don’t know.
This video’s about a year old and at the end of it, it’s the Chicago traders w/ Santelli, cheering Ron Paul. That someone would own the ChicagoTeaParty domain name doesn’t seem so weird in this context.
Jason // Mar 1, 2009 at 4:06 pm
It just strikes me as being a little convenient that the groundwork for all this seems to have been laid months in advance. It wouldn’t be all that expensive or difficult to have a number of sites on deck six months previous, and Santelli seems like the perfect guy to have handed a couple of choice phrases to to work into a populist rant live on air.
I’m not sure about the vast right-wing Charles Koch-led conspiracy business, and all that’s well beyond the scope of LOLFed anyway, but it sure looks like a lot of the accolades being heaped upon Rick for this are wholly undeserved. It would be nice if either he or CNBC would address this and issue an apology. It would also be nice if my dog didn’t snore, but that’s not likely to happen either.
PatMcGroin // Mar 2, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Two themes that intersected, maybe by accident, maybe not. He gets stuff stuck in his hand all day by the CME/CBoT populous- some is parroted, some not. No conspiracy here, if you’re not sure then you can meet him in the bar and ask him yourself…
RobT // Mar 2, 2009 at 8:24 pm
Cramer is the kid in first grade that keeps his crayons in an old shoe box and picks his nose and wipes it on his desk.
You look at him and realize you’re lucky not to be ‘special’.
Whatever happened to the movement for forced sterilization?
Exodus // Mar 10, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Not manufactured. If you’ve watched Santelli as long as I have, you know that this is not an unusual sentiment for him and you have basically said you didn’t know who he was, so I’m thinking you don’t know how he operates in general.
Correlation; we can has. Causation – no one can show me it.
Pat McGroin is basically correct.