“Once he had Mad Money‘s Jim Cramer at his desk, Jon Stewart showed…embarrassing clips from a 2006 interview with the website [Cramer] founded, TheStreet.com, in which he too candidly explained how hedge fund market manipulation really works.When Cramer explained, ‘There is market for it and you give it to them,’ Stewart stared at him in disbelief, exclaiming. ‘There’s a market for cocaine and hookers!'” — from Alessandra Stanley‘s 3.13 N.Y. Times story about the 3.12 Daily Show interrogation.

“I know Jim Cramer a little,” Andrew Sullivan wrote this morning. “The reason he crumbled last night, I think, is because deep down, he knows Stewart’s right. He isn’t that television clown all the way down. And deeper down, he knows it’s not all a game — now that they’ve run off with grandpa’s retirement money.

“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. In some ways, the blogosphere is to MSM punditry what Stewart is to Cramer: an insistent and vulgar demand for some responsibility, some moral and ethical accountabilty for previous decisions and pronouncements.

“I watched last night’s Daily Show with growing shock last night. 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. From then on, with the almost cruel broadcasting of his earlier glorifying of financial high-jinks, you almost had to look away. This was, in my view, a real cultural moment. It was a storming of the Bastille.”