Send in the clowns

Jon Stewart is a comedian, but it was Jim Cramer who was the clown tonight.
And for a guy who is side-splittingly funny, Steward seems to be taking on the Carlin role of our last angry man.
A couple of years ago, Stewart got outraged at CNN and MSNBC about how their anecdotal horse race coverage trivialized politics while boys were dying in a needless war.
Now Stewart is angry about the financial meltdown. And he's getting outraged at the financial press, like CNBC, because years and years of their pandering brownnosing Wall Streer coverage allowed a bunch of crooks and thieves to loot our retirement funds and then blame it on people who are now living in tents.
Stewart's Cramer interview tonight demonstrated that Stewart has thought deeply about what had gone wrong with America's financial system and with the financial reporting which was supposed to have alerted everyone to the danger. And Jim Cramer hasn't thought about it at all. So Cramer had a hard time explaining both his own actions and the generally smarmy tone of the whole financial press.
Towards the end, Cramer finally started to show some humanity and humility.
Now, don't get me wrong -- he still wasn't angry about what Jon Stewart is angry about -- Cramer didn't seem to be shedding a tear for the millions of people devastated by the financial meltdown.
But at least he showed a glimmer of real emotion when he talked about his feelings of betrayal, because the CEOs and financial managers he had thought were his friends had come on his show and lied to him.