Do We Have To Send You Back To The Daily Show Again?

Here's Jim Cramer building and knocking down a straw man on one of NBC's multi-platform products this morning:

I think it was a naive and misleading thing to attack the media. We weren’t behind this. CNBC, in particular, has been out front on this. … I think there are people who bear so much more responsibility [than the media] that it’s just wrong-headed: the politicians, the regulators, the SEC, the lenders, the investment banks. … It’s just a naive focus, it really is Meredith.

I like the part where Cramer says he was taking "the high road" on the interview, to Jon Stewart's face, while calling him naive when he won't be faced with a rebuttal. Quite a man.

What is misleading and fallacious is the notion that Stewart believes the media are solely responsible for the meltdown. He's a media critic, making the media his focus. But of course, everyone understands the failure of regulators and the greed of executives. That would be, um, not the point of the critique, which is that CNBC has abdicated their responsibility to the viewer to make any sense of the meltdown. And Cramer brushes aside his admission of guilt from when, um, HE was one of those traders on the other side engaging in illegal activity.

On the Monday show, The Daily Show ran a segment about short selling. That was meant to run right before Cramer's appearance (he alludes to it, but they cut it when the interview went over). The segment focused on the actual traders involved in this. It actually featured Deep Capture creator Patrick Byrne, the CEO of Overstock.com. So to say that Stewart is monomaniacally focused on the media's culpability is just wrong, and Cramer knows it.

Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson is concern trolling. Congrats, Tuckie, you got your name mentioned on the show!

Please Give Me Daily Show Airtime

It's clear that Tucker Carlson, well past his prime at the tender age of 39, was trolling for a response from Jon Stewart on Howard Kurtz' show in a desperate attempt to return to relevancy. The comments are hardly worth mentioning (I guess Tucker, who represented "the right" on Crossfire for close to a decade, doesn't consider himself partisan). But isn't the real person who should get a response to this Howard Kurtz, and his booker? How could a media criticism show possibly have someone as biased against Jon Stewart as the guy who was subject to the same kind of takedown five years ago and expect anything approaching a dispassionate analysis? To Kurtz' credit, he did play the Stewart/Carlson Crossfire clip, and asked him if it "colored" his view of the situation, but I'm wondering what value there is putting him on that show at all. He's going to lie about the interview, lie about Stewart's role, and lie about his own background. The verdict from a media standpoint is pretty clear - perhaps Carlson offers some kind of contrarian counter-perspective, but considering that he's still licking 5 year-old wounds, how is that perspective newsworthy? It's like bringing on John McCain to talk about Barack Obama... what, they do that too? Never mind.

I guess you could extrapolate that out and wonder the value in Howard Kurtz himself. However, in his print piece he at least got a statement from CNBC: "CNBC produces more than 150 hours of live television a week that includes more than 850 interviews in the service of exposing all sides of every critical financial and economic issue. We are proud of our record." They denied interview requests and refused to offer anything further. But an actual media critic would critique the media instead of giving audience to a defeated polemicist.

The Sad Spitzer Chronicles

It's really upsetting to see such a bright prospect in the Democratic Party, a guy who didn't make friends because he didn't put up with the bullshit, be brought so low. But he was of course a victim of his own hubris. Anyone who prosecuted scum as long as he did to not understand fundamentally how those rackets work and how easy it is to get caught is either stupid or amazingly arrogant.

Spitzer ended up as the subject of an investigation into the prostitution because his bank branch in Manhattan turned him in to the Internal Revenue Service as someone who might be engaged in suspicious currency transactions, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

Agents of the IRS Criminal Investigation Division initially started a probe, fearing that the governor was the victim of some sort of blackmail scheme or that he was being victimized by an impostor, the sources said.

Spitzer last year had wanted to wire transfer more than $10,000 from his branch to what turned out to be the front for the prostitution ring, QAT Consulting Group, which also uses a number of other names, in New Jersey, the sources said.

But Spitzer had the money broken down into several smaller amounts of less than $10,000 each, apparently to avoid federal regulations requiring the reporting of the transfer of $10,000 or more, the sources said. The regulations are aim to help spot possible illegal business activities, such as fraud or drug deals.

Apparently, having second thoughts about even sending the total amount in this manner, Spitzer then asked that the bank take his name off the wires, the sources said.

Bank officials declined, however, saying that it was improper to do so and in any event, it was too late to do so, because the money already had been sent, the sources said.

There's something unseemly about the IRS snooping around in every transaction checking for possible violations, but if anyone knows that's occurring it's the former Attorney General of the State of New York.

I still think there are some unanswered questions about how fast this got to the press and why the government is wiretapping prostitution rings and how Spitzer was so quickly burned for this, but clearly he needs to resign as is likely, though the New York Times is more noncommital, even suggesting that his wife wants him to stay in office.

Finally, it was nice to see Tucker Carlson end his ignominious run as a TV host with such class, simultaneously decrying the peering by Big Government into private consensual activity and also having Moonlight Bunny Ranch owner Dennis Hof on his show to speculate about all the deviant behaviors Spitzer might have engaged in, like whips and ball gags. He's really a superb human being. And how exactly does he know Dennis, anyway? It's irresponsible not to speculate.

Tucker Carlson: I'm Mentally Ill

In reference to the end of the standoff at the Hillary Clinton campaign office in New Hampshire, Tucker Carlson just said "this guy should have done what most mentally ill people in this country do, he should have started a blog."

Which, I'm assuming, is what Tucker will do, once his lame-ass show is canceled once and for all.

Tucker Carlson Luridly Describes Hate Crime

This is stunning. Tucker Carlson, he of the erstwhile bowtie, explains that when he was once cruised in a public bathroom, he responded by getting a friend and beating the fag up.

CARLSON: Let me -- let me put it this way. Whether he's gay or not actually is not our business, and I do think it's indefensible that the newspaper in Idaho spent a year interviewing 300 people to answer the question, Is he gay? That's none of your business. Having sex in a public men's room is outrageous. It's also really common. I've been bothered in men's rooms. I think people who do -

SCARBOROUGH: Really?

CARLSON: Yeah, I have. You know what, Let me just say.

SCARBOROUGH: Wait, hold on a second. Dan, hold on a second. I don't mean to take over, but have you been bothered in public restrooms, Dan? Because I know I haven't.

CARLSON: I have. I've been bothered in Georgetown Park. When I was in high school.

ABRAMS: Really?

CARLSON: Yes.

SCARBOROUGH: Wow.

CARLSON: And let me just say, I think --

SCARBOROUGH: That's something.

CARLSON: -- people should knock that off. I'm not anti-gay in the slightest, but that's really common, and the gay rights groups ought to disavow that kind of crap because, you know, that actually does bother people who didn't ask for being bothered [...]

CARLSON: But it's also -- but it's evidence, in Larry Craig's case -- I mean, you know, you just watch the press conference, and you see a man who's not in possession of himself. I mean, there's something -- you know, I'm not a shrink, but there's clearly something wrong with Larry Craig. He appeared to believe it. This is a guy who's been accused repeatedly over the years of soliciting sex from men in bathrooms. So the chances that he's arrested for the same thing accidentally --

ABRAMS: Right, right, right.

CARLSON: What, he's the unluckiest man and he's Job?

SCARBOROUGH: Hey, Tucker?

CARLSON: You know what I mean? It's insane!

SCARBOROUGH: Was he the guy in Georgetown, Tucker?

CARLSON: No, actually. I got that -- my point is -- let me just say --

ABRAMS: Tucker, what did you do, by the way? What did you do when he did that? We got to know.

CARLSON: I went back with someone I knew and grabbed the guy by the -- you know, and grabbed him, and -- and --

ABRAMS: And did what?

CARLSON: Hit him against the stall with his head, actually!

[laughter]

CARLSON: And then the cops came and arrested him. But let me say that I'm the least anti-gay right-winger you'll ever meet --

[laughter]

I guess the cops missed the hate crime part, just the terrible damage to Tucker's honor. Media Matters has the whole transcript. Is MSNBC going to do anything about one of their on-air personalities admitting to beating up a gay man?

I don't chastise Larry Craig because he's gay, it's because he's a hypocrite. And I question the legality of the arrest to begin with, given the circumstances. But what is unequivocal is that responding to solicitation by bashing the guy's skull against a door is a hate crime. Absolutely. What's the statute of limitations here? Can I make a citizen's arrest?

UPDATE: Digby makes a good point. How exactly did Carlson know he was being cruised?

Furthermore, if Carlson and his high school pal, whom he allegedly left the bathroom to find and then came back to assault this gay man, did this as a result of the guy "tapping his feet" on the floor and sliding his foot under the stall divider, as Larry Craig admitted to doing, then Tuckie knows a hell of a lot more about gay cruising signals that the average straight fellow. I asked my husband if he would have had a clue what it meant if someone did that and he didn't know what I was talking about.

When the "signals" are that obscure, only the people who are in on the code know what's going on. Everyone else just thinks it's some guy sliding his foot around weirdly and tapping his toes while he sits on the toilet and they don't respond. The guy moves on to someone who knows the code and responds that they are interested.

In other words, if Tucker is picking up these signals as a gay come on, then he's far more clued in to the gay world than any straight guy, except maybe a cop, would normally be. We don't know, of course, what really happened to Tucker that day when he was "bothered" in the men's room. Perhaps it was really aggressively sexual and traumatizing. But he didn't make any distinctions and made the case that he'd been a victim of someone like Craig, so Craig's behavior is all we really have to go on.

UPDATE II: Tucker defends himself by telling a completely different story:

Let me be clear about an incident I referred to on MSNBC last night: In the mid-1980s, while I was a high school student, a man physically grabbed me in a men's room in Washington, DC. I yelled, pulled away from him and ran out of the room. Twenty-five minutes later, a friend of mine and I returned to the men's room. The man was still there, presumably waiting to do to someone else what he had done to me. My friend and I seized the man and held him until a security guard arrived.

Several bloggers have characterized this is a sort of gay bashing. That's absurd, and an insult to anybody who has fought back against an unsolicited sexual attack. I wasn't angry with the man because he was gay. I was angry because he assaulted me.

That's simply a totally different story. In this one, a man assaulted him and he seized him for the cops after getting help. In the first one, someone "bothered" him, he got a friend, and bashed his head against a door. Which is it?