What the Santelli rant did was provide those already pissed-off viewers a place to focus their anger away from the financial services industry, and away from the genuinely bipartisan effort to subsidize Wall Street. Santelli’s rant fostered the illusion that the crisis was caused by poor people, which in this county usually conjures a vision of minorities, no matter how many poor white people there are, borrowing for too much house. It was classic race politics—the plantation owner keeping the seemingly inevitable pitchfork out of his abdomen by pitting poor whites against poor blacks. And it
...more
