Jon Stewart Disappointed Me
I’m usually a big fan, but Jon Stewart really disappointed me over this Jim Cramer kerfuffle. He looked like just another guy who got their marching orders from the Obama Administration to attack anyone who criticized them, which is disappointing because he was always one of the first to criticize the Bush Administration when they did my same.
My opinion is mainly the same as most other conservatives. He never seemed to think Cramer was a “snake oil salesman” when he was criticizing George Bush, or late last year when Cramer was singing the praises of the economic team Obama put together. If we want to attack people for not doing the “investigative journalism,” let’s look at the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN…or even Congress, which for the past two years has been under Nancy Pelosi control, who could have held hearings and subpoenaed anyone she felt like.
Does Jon Stewart think that Chuck Schumer and Chris Dodd, the chairmen of the Senate Finance and Banking committees respectively, “knew what the bankers were doing?” BTW, Schumer and Dodd are two of the top recipients of AIG campaign donations.
But since the last thing we need is another conservative complaining aboot it, I give you Richard Cohen, my favourite New York liberal this side of Lee Goldman…
What Jon Stewart needs is Jon Stewart. He could use a droll comedian to temper his ferocity and correct him when he’s wrong, as he was about the financial media, particularly CNBC and its excitable analyst Jim Cramer. They didn’t cover up the story of financial shenanigans. They didn’t even know it existed…
But the role that Cramer and other financial journalists played was incidental. There was not much they could do, anyway. They do not have subpoena power. They cannot barge into AIG and demand to see the books, and even if they could, they would not have known what they were looking at. The financial instruments that Wall Street firms were both peddling and buying are the functional equivalent of particle physics. To this day, no one knows their true worth…
Stewart, too, rides the zeitgeist. The hunt is on for culprits and scapegoats, and Stewart has served up a cliche: the media…Stewart plays a valuable role. He mocks authority, which is good, and he mocks those, such as the media, who take the word of authority as if, well, it’s authoritative. But given the outsize reception to his cheap shot at business media, he ought to turn his wit inward: Mocker, mock thyself.
Read the whole thing, as they say.
UPDATE: I wonder what Jon thinks of 15 Democrats opposing the Obama budget too?
UPDATE DEUX: To be fair to Jon Stewart…
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