Tucker Carlson Concern-Trolls Jon Stewart at Daily Beast

The Daily Beast is becoming the go-to website for political feuds, from Max Blumenthal's throwdown with Media Malpractice filmmaker John Ziegler, to Meghan McCain's battle with Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham. But Tucker Carlson is changing all of that. Instead of slamming Jon, as he did on CNN's Reliable Sources, he just wants to help now, offering Stewart advice on how to keep his TV show on the air. From The Daily Beast:

Like most sermons, Stewart's showdown with Jim Cramer ended with a neat moral lesson. Once journalists who cover business regain their sense of responsibility and "start getting back to fundamentals on the reporting," Stewart said gravely, "I can get back to making fart noises and funny faces."

But it's too late. The great comedian is gone, maybe forever. Jon Stewart is stuck in lecture mode.

"The great comedian." What a moving tribute, from a great pundit.

The catalyst for Carlson's helpfulness is Jon Stewart's evisceration of Tucker Carlson on Crossf Jim Cramer of CNBC, and Tucker takes great pains to get it right.

The climax came as Stewart put up a number of grainy clips of Cramer describing how to artificially (and unethically) depress a company's stock price. The video was damning. Cramer looked sweaty.

Stewart summed up the significance of what Cramer had said on the tape: "You can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the stuff that was being pulled at Bear and at AIG, and all this derivative-market stuff," he said sternly.

Except that you can't draw any such line. In the video, Cramer hadn't mentioned derivates or securitized loans or credit-default swaps, or any of the other exotic financial instruments that caused the fall of AIG and the current recession. There's no evidence that Jim Cramer had anything to do with any of that, and Stewart didn't offer any.

By jove, he's right! Cramer's dissertation on the stock market as his own personal sandbox (with your 401k being shoveled around) is not at all similar to the shenanigans that caused the current financial crisis. Or, at least, they're not exactly the same thing, which is clearly what Stewart said, right? Right?

Here's hoping Jon Stewart pays close attention to Tucker Carlson's wise counsel, so that he can be just as successful someday.

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