Friday, March 13, 2009

Is Jon Stewart a Modern-Day David Frost?

I'm going to summarize last night's interview of Jim Cramer by Jon Stewart as follows:
Jon Stewart pwned Jim Cramer.
Now, I know that there are limitations to comparing Jon Stewart to David Frost. For starters, Cramer isn't nearly as important as Nixon, and of course, Stewart is a comedian, whereas Frost was a reporter. Actually, even within this fiasco, Cramer isn't as important as Nixon was with his administration, since Cramer isn't in charge of the others.
Now, Stewart didn't sit around interviewing Cramer several hours a day for about a week, but of course, Stewart didn't need to wear Cramer down and get him to say internally inconsistent things within the interview. Of course, he had a modern advantage. It has become easy - and in fact standard - for there to be several clips ready to be played at a moment's notice.
I found it particularly amusing when a clip was rolled where Cramer was explaining how to pull one of those tricks regarding hedge funds. Cramer tried to say that he was trying to out the bad guys and explain how it works. Then, of course, another clip was rolled, showing that Cramer was suggesting this as actual advice. Cramer was caught in a lie in the interview. Even if he didn't lie during the interview, however, it still would have shown him for what he is.

OK, I'm going to post this even though it's not polished yet, just to get it out there. I've got plans today and tomorrow, so I don't know when I'll finish this.
Also, FYI, I wasn't really planning to blog right now, but once I saw that interview, I knew that I just had to say something.

You can see the whole interview uncensored (i.e., unbleeped), at http://www.thedailyshow.com/index.jhtml .

EDIT 2009/Mar/20: OK, I know that I intended to flesh out that post more, but I've been too busy. I'm shooting for early next week. In the meantime, I figured that this is as good of a place as any to write down this quote that I've been meaning to grab for a few weeks now:
"Isn't the Dow Jones Industrial Average just a short-twitch numerical representation of a bunch of guesses about other people's assumptions about the financial well-being of an arbitrarily chosen group of thirty out of tens of thousands of possible companies?" -Jon Stewart

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