Santelli’s Dutch Oven Journalism

Two weeks ago, Rick Santelli couldn’t get arrested. Two weeks from now, Santelli will be an ex-CNBC employee and gainfully employed at Faux News. What a short and familiar trip its been.

Back on Feb 19th, Santelli seemed to have a Howard Beale moment, that is if Beale was more concerned with his bank account than his brain. It turns out that Santelli’s rant was not only false on the “Beale meter”, it was false in how it all came about, according to Mark Ames and Yasha Levine in Playboy (do I need to mention that the previous link is not safe for work?).

Ames and Levine felt that Santelli’s call for a Chicago Tea Party was not that spontaneous. With years of experience reporting in Russia, where the Kremlin use astroturfing — faux grassroot campaigns financed by those in power — “to influence and control the political landscap,” Ames and Levin thought that the rant and its response “had a strangely forced quality to it.” Scripted, if you will.

What Ames and Levine found was “a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity.” All of this orchestrated by

. . . the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.

Ames and Levine write:

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.

Tennesse’s Southern Beale does a great safe-for-work job in blogging about the importance and the danger of what is going on.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen fake “grassroots” campaigns funded by conservative megabazillionaires like Howard Ahmanson, Tom Monaghan, Rev. Moon and the DeVos family. Conservatives have a whole group of these moneybags they can turn to when they need to finance a new astroturf operation.

The Republican Party treats its politics like it does its economics, trickle down, and as this episode shows, they will use their base how they see fit, however demeaning and degrading it is to their followers. The Republican minions might have a stake in the future, but they have no voice — Twitter, Facebook and tea parties are just shiny objects meant to distract.