Mad Money Man Not So Mad At Daily Pwning

After the faux populous bluster of the Santelli incident, The Daily Show's Jon Stewart invited the man over for an interview; presumably to ask how it was that one who has been deeply immersed in the world of finance for thirty years could lay the blame for our country's economic woes at the feet of a man who's been in office for less than 90 days. Santelli declined. Several weeks later after the surfacing of this video, Stewart went on a rampage:



After some more back and forth asked Jim Cramer on the Show.




In accordance with our bitterly divided electorate, reactions to Jon Stewart fall into two polar categories

A) He's picking up the slack of a failed institution (the forth estate)

B) He's a partisan hack; a mouth piece for the Obama Admin/Democratic Party, etc. Someone who owes his entire career to our bumbling 43 president.

Just to point out the obvious, The Daily Show has been airing since '96 and Stewart has been anchoring it since '98 (an eternity in the entertainment business). And if one cares to watch those pre-Bush Admin. episodes it would be clear that The Daily Show was always a parody news program that parodied real journalism. Jim Cramer's show Mad Money could rightly be classed as financial journalism so...

People have said that Stewart chose to go after Cramer because of Cramer's attack on Obama. But it's fairly clear that Stewart's indictment is of CNBC and big media in general, Cramer just happened to be a visible face.


Other people dismiss Stewart as a liberal Rush Limbaugh. And though they both are technically entertainers, the similarities pretty much end there.

Stewart is family man who was basically your typical comic until the all this 9/11 madness spurred him to become something more. In disbelief of what was rammed down our collective throats in the name of fighting terrorism, he began to use his platform to speak out against the coercion of corporate media by the government.

I won't call Rush stupid like a lot of people I know, because he's obviously very shrewd and knows exactly what he's spouting and why. What I will say is Rush is an addict (if you know anything about addicts, that fact should explain almost everything). A very sick man consumed by emotion, lashing out with righteous rage in every direction. He uses the label of comedian as a shield for his polemical, and often racist/misogynistic pontifications.

What I'm basically trying to say is that though the two men occupy what could technically be called a similar field, they've arrived there from opposite directions.

As much as his detractors would have you believe otherwise, Jon Stewart is an anomaly. A comedian who due to extraordinary circumstance (the said utter failure of the forth estate) has crossed over into the world of serious journalism.