To get the full delicious flavor of what happened, you have to watch the earlier videos in order.
On Wednesday March 4, Jon Stewart’s guest was supposed to be Rick Santelli, a CNBC doof who went all ballistic on President Obama’s plans to help out struggling homeowners. Santelli cancelled, and Stewart ran an eye-opening and embarrassing piece about how CNBC didn’t know jack shit, or if they did, they weren’t telling their audience.
The clip itself (scroll down). (the full episode if you’re interested. The clip referenced is very near the beginning.)
Jim Cramer, another CNBC doof, took exception to Stewart’s skewering of CNBC. Cramer wasn’t the focus of Stewart’s piece but he did appear in it, along with several other CNBC doofs. He wrote in a column:
Stewart, not wanting to pass up such a golden opportunity, put together another piece, this time focusing on Jim Cramer. It’s pretty damning.
The clip itself is on this Salon article’s page (scroll down). Here’s the full episode, which also has the clip very near the beginning of the show.
The next day, Jim Cramer went on the Today show and was broadsided when they showed him the clip from the night before. The split screen showing his face (he obviously hadn’t seen it beforehand) is priceless.
The clip (scroll down, and be patient because they talk about some other economic things first). Cramer also went on the Joe Doucheborough show to snark about Stewart, but I don’t have a clip of that.
So, Stewart invited Jim Cramer to come on to The Daily Show and Cramer accepted, and he was on the show Thursday March 12. He must have thought he was going to get a few jokes at his expense and then they’d make nice, but Stewart had other plans, and articulated the anger that millions of Americans have, not so much at Cramer specifically, but at the lax financial reporting and the games played with people’s money. It’s breathtakingly spectacular, and wonderfully refreshing.
You HAVE to watch the full episode. There’s no one clip that will do it justice. There’s an even longer version because they had to cut some things for time, but watch the one that the rest of us saw first. That’s the one that got national (and international) attention.
For some reason there seems to be a partisan divide in the reactions to the Stewart/CNBC/Cramer fued which I don’t understand. Stewart wasn’t going after Cramer because Cramer’s a Republican (Cramer is a Democrat who voted for Obama, or so I hear) but all the nasty comments toward Stewart about this seem to come from conservatives. And that’s why I asked Lonesome if he was pleased with Stewart’s taking on CNBC. You’d think, right? I’m still waiting for an answer but LP might not be reading this thread anymore (see, I’m giving you an out LP).