Back in 2006, I was working on the state Senate campaign of our very own NYBri. One day, I was riding up to SD-41 from NYC with a volunteer and we began to discuss this Keith Olbermann guy. He had just started doing his now mostly unwatchable "special comments" and we both marveled at how truly odd, how so very American, actually, it was that the one guy on national television who seemed to have the guts to say that the Emperor truly had no clothes was a washed up sportscaster on what truly had to be his last chance in the bigs.
Tonight, I watched a comedian shame the entire profession of journalism. It reminded me very much of the afternoon back in the summer of 2004 when that same comedian appeared on the now defunct CNN show "Crossfire." That day, Jon Stewart went on national television, into the very lion's den of hacktacular political theater of the day, and utterly destroyed Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala with simple, unvarnished truth.
Stewart performed such a service to the nation again this evening, reminding professional clown Jim Cramer that:
What it feels like to us, and I'm speaking purely as a layman, it feels like we are capitalizing your adventure by our pensions and our hard earned (money) and that it is a game that you know, that you all know what is going on, but that you go on television as a financial network and pretend isn't happening... I gotta tell ya, ya know, I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it's not a f#&@cking game...and when I watch that...I can't tell you how angry that makes me. Because what it says to me is that you all know.
If there is any justice left in the world, Jim Cramer's career as a professional cheerleader for crooks is over and CNBC will have lost whatever last shred of credibility they may have had left.
