[VIDEO] Rick Santelli on victims of foreclosure: ‘Losers’ who engaged in ‘bad behavior’

By Channing Kennedy Feb 19, 2009

In case your brain has been working too well lately, here’s CNBC’s Rick Santelli, laying it down on Obama’s proposed foreclosure rescue plan. To wit:

"The government is promoting bad behavior … How about this, president and new administration? Why don’t you put up a website and have people vote on the internet, as a referendum, to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages, or would we at least like to buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure, and give them to people who might actually have a chance to prosper down the road, and reward people who could carry the water instead of drink the water."

The politics at play — the idea of an Other whose suffering is the will of the Universe — are disturbingly familiar, but now Santelli is now getting spun into something of a "people’s champion" as this clip loops on CNBC and MSNBC. Apparently the kids really dig his rap on how a majority of America (i.e. the ten percent of people who hold all the wealth) would rather put eight dollars in a savings account (what?) than see bad behavior rewarded (the rewarding of bad behavior does not include any of the trillion-dollar banking bailouts from the last few months). CNBC is capitalizing on the burst of traffic, and while the commentariat is on board for the "Chicago Tea Party," most bloggers are getting tripped up on why Santelli is talking about what cars they drive in Cuba.

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