The Incredible Santelli (UPDATED)
If good looks was a minute/ You know that you could've been an hour- Smokey Robinson, 'The Way You Do The Things You Do'
In the video, Jon Stewart descends with furious righteousness on the CNBC network. As we’ve covered already, CNBC is the forum for the disease which is strangling our economy. The network wants to define itself as the place where Wall Street is the victim in this mess. We all know that this is false. Wall Street created this mess, and it is we taxpayers who are bailing them out from their egregious losses.
Yet again, Jon Stewart stands as a bulwark of reason against those who wish to confuse the public with populist hokum. If only more media outlets distanced themselves from their corporate teet and gave the true facts of this crisis, we might be able to have some enlightened discussion instead of panic and partisan talking points.
- More on the talking boob show which is CNBC at Salon.
At the same time, however, the network depends on a particular industry, and thrives on good economic news, which is in short supply. Nobody wants to tune in to cable day after day to hear yet another dirge for yet another one of their stocks. There is a financial imperative for the pundits to keep their core audience of investors coming back, and therefore an obligation for the pundits to distort empirical reality to make a grim future seem manageable. Or, as one commercial puts it, “In an unpredictable market, one man has the answers, the vision, the experience you can trust. In Cramer we trust.”
And yet the financial future is starting to seem unmanageable, even to the all-knowing pundits of CNBC. Someone must be to blame. Thus the essence of CNBC circa 2009 is an uneasy mixture of despair and boosterism, made to cohere with the liberal application of pure venom. And the venom is directed at the most convenient target: Barack Obama.
I will be at a Shambollocks! Outing this evening (and so should you!), but I will TiVo Stewart handing Cramer his head on The Daily Show. 
O'Hare Arpt., IL
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