One of these men is a bootlick nervously fighting the exposure of those for whom he shills.

See if you can spot the difference.

As I have shown, in his writing Jim is up-front about his own law-breaking. However, the previous video, with its confession of participation in crimes, apparently embarrassed Jim when it became public. He continued to shift his position, now remaining vague about whether he is talking about himself, or about other people. (I am reminded of something I figured out when I was about 10: When adults espouse psychological theories about how others behave, they were generally talking about themselves. Please remember that hypothesis as you watch the following two clips.)

On March 2, 2007, Jim explained what he he did when he ran a hedge fund. Or is he just saying that this is what he saw when he ran a hedge fund? He stays just coy enough that it is hard to say, but after he gets it off his chest, he acts like a blow-hard with his colleague, trying, in my view, to to bury psychically what has just confessed publicly.

Then, on March 9, 2007, Jim Cramer explicitly stated on his TV show that hedge funds work with compliant members of the financial media to manipulate stock. In other words, he said just what I had been saying for two years, that he had been deriding.

When I first began to raise the issues being explored in DeepCapture, I was roundly and severely criticized, especially by CNBC, and especially by Jim Cramer. They did this though they (or at least, Jim Cramer) knew I was right. Once the issues raised by DeepCapture became impossible to ignore, Jim Cramer began dealing with his guilty knowledge by explaining these issues to the public, in the process saying precisely what I had been saying since 2004, for which I had been roundly and continuously criticized, especially by CNBC, especially by Jim Cramer. Thus, if the preceding pieces have a surreal quality, it means you were paying attention.

Dan (“We have buckets of ink and barrels of cash to crush them”) Colarusso serves his normal obfuscatory function by confusing the legal act of shorting with the illegal act of naked shorting, spinning and downplaying (I call it the “short sellers build strong bones and teeth” speech).

Becky Quick lays off.

And then, when the news breaks of the NYSE following up with a crack-down of their own, the same morning gang which has derided, downplayed and covered up this issue suddenly is talking about “legal murder” of companies through stock manipulation.

As a prefatory comment, however, I should note that as far as I can tell, Charles Gasparino is the only honest reporter at CNBC (Donny Deutsche is honest but he is not a reporter, and Becky Quick is a reporter, but she does not go out of her way to be honest or dishonest).

There is, I believe, something important to be learned from this fact. Most Wall Street reporters I meet seem soft. A few are dumb (don’t ask Joe Nocera, Roddy Boyd, or Tim Mullaney to whip up a batch of jet-fuel for you) but most are just soft. They may be capable of writing critical pieces regarding this or that executive or company, if spoon-fed the requisite details by their hedge fund sources, but they are constitutionally incapable of thinking critically about the Establishment from whence they spring.

Hence, for example, as previous posts have shown, CNBC adopted a Party Line that recognized no distinction between short selling and naked short selling, insisted that Patrick Byrne’s beef is just that his stock went down, short selling always builds strong bones and teeth for America, and anyone questioning this received wisdom must be wacky wacky wacky. This Party Line was parroted with fervor by Herb Greenberg, Jim Cramer, Joe Kernan, Dan Colarusso, and the rest of the CNBC gang.

Charles Gasparino, on the other hand, is a tough working-class Italian guy from the Bronx. He is not soft and, as as a result, he had the character to speak up. This makes Gasparino seem extraordinary. In fact, however, I think he is how normal journalists were, one or two generations ago.

A year later, in true “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia” fashion, Herb would write a story claiming that I had tried to cover-up my receipt of an SEC subpoena.

Becky seemed put-off at my correction, then proceeded to bicker in an attempt to sound like a hard-headed journalist. Unfortunately, as you will see, in her eagerness she began tripping over her own statements, simultaneously accusing me of orchestrating a federal investigation and not knowing the first thing about it. Anticipating that something like this was going to happen, and having grown tired of going on CNBC and having them talk over me in order to prevent my actual claims from getting aired, I slipped into a Morchai Vanunu routine.

If you forgot who Mordechai Vanunu is, this is he (and yes, I had prepared the sign before showing up at the CNBC studio in San Francisco).

More interesting than Jeff’s smarmy squirming and Ron Insana’s reaction thereto, however, is Ron’s spinning, which has become more heavy-handed than it had been the previous week. Evidently the goal was to make unthinkable the simple truth that the lawsuit concerned illegal acts sworn to by witnesses and participants, and the broader claims about naked short selling concerned the health over hundreds of firms, the jobs and savings of millions, and the fragility of the capital market: thus, Ron seems to have been following instructions to insist upon a Party Line that “Byrne is suing because he is mad these people say mean things about Overstock, but if only he focused on his business” blah blah blah. As should be clear by now, that became the doctrinal truth that CNBC journalists, Bethany McLean, Joe Nocera, and Roddy Boyd were to reinforce in subsequent months with great fervor, so as to preclude the public from reaching any substantive understanding about the claims made or issues at stake.

In this offensive, which I have called a “mitzvah”, “crusade”, and (when speaking of how my opponents view it) a “jihad”, I alleged that:

1) The SEC had grown inappropriately close to Wall Street (which SEC Senior Investigator Gary Aguirre and a Senate Judiciary Committee report have since confirmed);

2) The New York state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer was a corrupt finger-puppet (subsequent events have confirmed the corruption, and I am waiting for anyone in the press to see the “finger-puppet” implication of Spitzer’s favorite girl, Ashlee, living rent-free in the summer home of Spitzer’s biggest donor, Jim Chanos);

3) Certain hedge funds had grown inappropriately close to certain journalists of the financial press (which CNBC’s own Jim Cramer has since confirmed);

4) As a result of the indolence of the SEC, New York Attorney General, and financial press, a circle of hedge funds were taking down companies through:

• naked short-selling (which SEC Chairman Chris Cox has since confirmed);
• class action lawsuits by Milberg Weiss (which a DOJ indictment and a stack of convictions has since confirmed);
• “independent research” which was in fact bought-and-paid for (to which I already had a stack of affidavits attesting).

I hope, then, dear reader, that I do not assume too much when I write: perhaps in retrospect these claims are not so improbable as they may have first sounded.

The afternoon of my Miscreants’ Ball presentation, I was invited to go onto CNBC to be interviewed by Ron Insana, and the spinning began. Over time, that spin-job would be composed of at least five elements:

1) Referring to the Overstock suit against Rocker and Gradient as being about short-selling while glossing over the allegations regarding an inappropriate relationship between Rocker and the putatively independent research house (e. g., letting Rocker order, edit, preview, and front-run the reports on Overstock.com);

2) Referring to the case against David Rocker as being about naked short selling, when in fact the suit did not mention naked short selling;

3) Continuously failing to distinguish between short selling and naked short selling (which is like failing to distinguish between sex and sexual harassment);

4) Relying upon the preceding vaguenesses in support of a cover-up, that cover-up being that this was simply a fight about short selling, and which insisted upon the benefits of short selling (without distinguishing it from the illegal offshoot);

5) Overstock was not a good company, and therefore none of my claims about the capital markets could be true. (Yes, it is an obvious non sequitur, but not so obvious that it was not blindly parroted by more or less the entirety of the New York financial press, without a trace of critical thinking regarding its logic.)

The obfuscation that began in this interview would in time become a roar.