Tea parties? Tea bagging? The media circus is coming to a TV screen near you.

It started innocuous enough, by a little known Chicago commodities trader with a part time gig on MSNBC. In a short segment on Feb 19, 2009, Rick Santelli came unglued on air, ranting about the basic unfairness of being forced to have your tax dollars spent on saving the asses of lazy, stupid people, who bought homes they couldn't afford. The now infamous "rant".

Subsequent events - collapsing employment numbers and home values - soon proved Santilli off the mark, but the damage was done. Anytime an on air media personality leaves the script, the news itself becomes the news. When one not just leaves the script, but shouts a passionate rap many people are thinking but won't say, that chunk of video goes viral on the net.

The actual concept that rich Americans should not have to pay to help control the damage to the economy never did get any traction. Santilli's "issue" disappeared as fast as it arrived. However the "Tea Party" concept stuck, even though it was only a toss out line never meant to be. On the internet small, dispersed groups of affected right wing bloggers took up the cause - protests against "Obamanomics" organized around a Boston Tea Party theme.

At first invisible and unfocused, the mobilized few brought their own personal baggage from the election to the table. Republican disorganization and defeatism had left a yawning gap out on the right side of America, and the Tea Party movement caught the attention of the desperate right wing blogosphere. A small, wingnut internet hullabaloo, the mainstream media ignored it in the face of daily economic headlines of collapse.

However, behind the scenes, influential republican blogs were being peppered with hits on the subject. Even though the real Tea Party is remembered by history as a protest against "taxation without representation", and the new protests were a grab bag of vitriol of election lost, the imagery and patriotic jingoism fit perfectly with things GOP. The poop began to roll uphill.

Powerful Republican blogs began to sign on to the concept, and while down on the streets befuddled groups of twenty braved the cold and wet with a mad variety of issues, signs, and pseudo patriotic clothing bits, the wheels were in motion in the plush GOP suites of Washington. Mired behind the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Michael Steele, the GOP brain trust needed something, anything on which to hang their Stetson hats. The Tea Party movement was just the thing.

Powerful Conservative blog's run by powerful Washington insiders began to put order to the Tea Party chaos. Sites like "Americans for Prosperity", perennial GOP bagman Dick Armey's "Freedom Works", and none other than Newt Gringrich's "American Solutions" took the lead. The prodigious resources of the battered Republican machine began to enter the fray, and the Tea Party began to make the news. Fox News.

If the Tea Party story is anything, it's a wonderful example of how the blogosphere can indeed drive the news. With the full weight of the GOP behind it, the Liberal left simply had to weigh in, MSNBC giving the job to it's own media sensation and former internet star Rachael Maddow, who coined the term "Tea Baggers" on air - a particularly nasty slur for any that understand the colloquial meaning of being "tea bagged" (google it, then watch the next clip).

In the end, what started by an angry millionaire trader, and moved to befuddled middle Americans, then to the vacuum of the conservative blogosphere, moved on to inner Republican circles and ultimately, the mainstream media through Fox News. Tea party or tea bagging, either way it is a stellar anatomy of a media frenzy waged between two armed and dangerous camps in America. Even with the nation's very way of life tanking daily through economic collapse, American politics can't resist yet another bread and circuses for the masses. If anything, it will fill a news cycle, and nothing more.