Ron Paul Snubbed Again: Now CNBC’s Rick Santelli Heralded For Coining “Tea Party”

by Frances Martel | 8:12 pm, April 15th, 2010

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Even taking into consideration the conservative convention straw polls that have somehow put him in the frontrunner position for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, Ron Paul just can’t catch a break. Now even his most lasting contribution to the national political conversation, the “Tea Party,” is being reappropriated to CNBC on-air editor Rick Santelli.

The intellectual property theft comes to us via Big Journalism, where Gregg Opelka calls him a “forgotten hero” for “technically” being the first to evoke the Boston Tea Party in the context of modern politics. Despite being lightly mocked, Opelka narrates, Santelli continued an anti-big government monologue that Opelka claims started it all:

The unapologetic Santelli just kept ranting, suggesting the Tax Day Tea Party that would very soon come to be—and unwittingly inspiring a modern day grass-roots revolution that threatens to play a huge role in the midterm elections.

He provides the clip of Santelli’s tirade in his post, and dates it February 19th, 2009– two years after Ron Paul supporters first started calling for exactly the same thing. Here is an article from the December 17, 2007 edition Boston Globe entitled “Ron Paul Backers Stage Boston Tea Party, Raise Millions,” chronicling the literal reenactment of the Boston Tea Party that Paul supporters staged that year. And below, video of a Paul supporter-created online ad for the event:

Big Journalism, Boston Globe, boston tea party, CNBC, Gregg Opelka, Rick Santelli, Ron Paul, Tea Party

Snipzor

What a dick.
shootfromthehip

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 19th 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.” “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.