Rick Santelli’s phony populism

Writing for Playboy, Mark Ames and Yasha Levine assert that:

…Santelli's "rant" was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19^th call for a "Chicago Tea Party" was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, 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 use the rest of their article to connect the dots in what must be considered a conspiracy!

The problem posed by this report should be obvious, as DailyKos makes clear:

…CNBC has staged the news, not just a single incident, but a whole string of discussions and programs that have been at the center of CNBC's programming since Santelli's staged rant. And from the evidence — including the fact that the website used to organize the so-called tea party was created well in advance by the same right wing sources who orchestrated the Obama-Ayers story — it appears that at least some of those involved were in on the scam [emphasis deleted].

Of course, a fair and sober reader can easily locate the actual news in this story, namely: The staged populist reaction to the Obama stimulus program.

Will CNBC, a key actor in this play, do anything to repair the damage their complicity in this hoax has inflicted on the public?