Of all the political and financial narratives we needed in 2009, this was surely not it. Reasoned critiques of leveraged capitalism, solutions that required sacrifice—these were things that did not yield exciting blog posts or spread well online. But the Santelli clip did. CNBC fell ass first into the perfect storm of what spreads on the web—humiliation, conspiracy theories, anger, frustration, humor, passion, and possibly the interplay of several or all of these things together.
