Playboy Says Rick Santelli Rant Was Staged - Updated

Update: 5pm - It looks like skeptics of the Playboy story might be right. The link has been dead most of the day. I tried to contact Playboy, ("I always thought requests for clarification from your magazine were made up, until it happened to me...") but haven't heard back yet.

Since Rick Santelli's February 19th rant, subsequent excoriation by Robert Gibbs, and paranoid whinefest about Gibbs' response, Playboy Magazine has been doing a little bit of homework on the CNBC personality:

What we discovered is 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 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.

First of all, can I get a "verifiably-read-Playboy-for-the-articles" five? Don't leave me hangin'!

The piece goes on to give me a headache, detailing links between Santelli's rant and known "astroturfers," fake grassroots organizers. I had to take a break and browse the rest of the site for awhile.

Certainly, the speed and fervor with which Matt Drudge pushed this story was a little suspicious. He gave it a siren headline before he even had a link.

Even so, my reaction to this is similar to that of claims that PUMA was an astroturf organization: who cares? This "Tea Party" movement is a joke, even being mocked by conservative sites like Hot Air. Santelli's rant is getting zero traction, so I hope the GOP is throwing lots of money at it. Just another in a long line of mistakes, and another day in the 8 years of the Obama Era.

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