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Friday, March 13, 2009

Jim Cramer for President 

Well, maybe not -- maybe only for Secretary of Treasury.

The video Scats posted below is amazing, of course; Stewart is correct and articulate, Cramer justly humiliated, etc.

However, I have to remind everyone of a couple of things:

1) The ontological principle by which we can safely say that anyone who is the object of media derision -- i.e., Cramer -- is ipso facto more honest and truthful than the media deriding him; for the reason that media members engaged in tarring and feathering of the "bad men" are necessarily using the public spectacle to shift blame from themselves for behavior that is objectively the same as, or worse, than the crime being denounced.

Glenn Greenwald points this out in his very good Salon piece, which celebrates Stewart, while also pointing out that Cramer and CNBC are absolutely typical of the mainstream media, and that Tim Russert in particular was as a journalist as bad as or worse than his fellow GE employees at CNBC. Both Russert and Cramer carelessly or gleefully passed on lies (from bank CEO's, from Bush hit-men) and then plead innocence for having been lied to.

2) Greenwald also points out that Cramer is unlike Russert and the other dead MSM'ers, who never apologize or even acknowledge criticism. That Cramer actually met with Stewart and said he was wrong shows that he is of infinitely greater integrity than Russert, Mitchell, Gregory, Couric, Gibson, Schieffer and the other decomposing corpses who have died in the near or distant past.

So if Cramer isn't automatically being considered for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, perhaps he could be considered for Timmie Geithner's job?

P.S.: This piece in the Washington Post perhaps makes Geithner's recent behavior seem a tad more excusable; there are reasons to think that the much-desired gov't "takeover" of the banks would not deal with the real problems raised by bad bonds owned by international investors. Still, this doesn't explain why the money is being poured directly into the banks, rather than into the banks through the conduits of individual bad mortgages -- for this would at least start to reduce debt and interest rates. (And as Stewart makes clear, the "moral hazard" of mortgage relief is far preferable to the immoral larceny of filling the coffers of gamblers who leveraged mortgages 35-1.)

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