Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish had an excellent post yesterday that summed up a great deal of how many felt with Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer on Thursday. Here for me are some of the money quotes from Sullivan:

Did you expect that? I expected a jolly and ultimately congenial discussion, after some banter. What Cramer walked into was an ambush of anger. He crumbled from the beginning...

Stewart - that little comic with the Droopy voice for Lieberman - is actually becoming an accidental activist. ... what Stewart has done is rip off that little band-aid of faux solidarity for a modicum of ethical and moral accountability...

It's not enough any more, guys, to make fantastic errors and then to carry on authoritatively as if nothing just happened. You will be called on it. ... [A]n insistent and vulgar demand for some responsibility, some moral and ethical accountability for previous decisions and pronouncements.

Braver, please. And louder.

Reading blog posts yesterday in response to the great CNBC/Daily Show debate was interesting. I agree wholeheartedly with Sullivan. The issue isn't conservative -vs - liberal or news - vs - comedy. If you are liberal you watch MSNBC. If you are conservative you watch Fox. If you want news maybe you watch the Evening News shows or CNN from time to time. CNBC and similar networks are promising information and news but have been giving us something else. Which is what Stewart called Cramer on.

Stewart was clearly angry, and as my wife commented, he was saying all the things that many of us want to say to people like Cramer. He never let Cramer off the hook until the very end when he accepted a sort-of promise from Cramer to do better. He kept saying over and over that this wasn't personally about Jim Cramer. It was about the promises of the network knowing the behind the scenes shenanigans and turning away.

We have found over these past 35 post-Watergate years that from time to time we are no longer giving that kind of a pass to presidents and other politicians as often as we used to. Now may be another turning point in calling those we thought we could trust with information on their crap as well.