Page Nav

HIDE
Friday, December 27

Pages

Classic Header

Breaking News:
latest

Backfire: After Calling for Military-Enforced Mandates, Triple-Vaxed Jim Cramer Tests Positive for COVID

  One doesn’t want to make much out of a triple-vaccinated COVID scold getting the virus. It could happen to the any of us. However, it also...

 One doesn’t want to make much out of a triple-vaccinated COVID scold getting the virus. It could happen to the any of us. However, it also happens to Jim Cramer.

Cramer, who screams about “best of breed” stocks on his CNBC show, isn’t the “best of” anything — aside from dispensing bad advice. The stock-picker is infamous for his sanguine predictions about Bear Stearns in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, although his suggestion that the military get involved in enforcing a vaccine mandate was arguably worse.

Mind you, de facto martial law isn’t the only heinous idea being floated by the left for those who refuse to get vaccinated, up to and including forced unemployment. 

On his Nov. 29 show, Cramer called for a universal vaccination mandate in the mold, he claimed, of Dwight Eisenhower’s polio vaccine rollout in the 1950s — during which, he averred, neighbors would snitch on you if you didn’t get it.

“Lord knows what happened if you didn’t partake,” Cramer said. “But back then, anyone who refused to get vaccinated would get ratted out immediately because we knew that person could hurt other people. The commonweal was … the commonweal.

“Now we’re engaged with a similar struggle with COVID, and Eisenhower would be aghast,” he continued. “We have immunocompromised people who are incubators for every variant to come walking around lawfully unvaccinated? That’s psychotic.”

“So it’s time to admit that we have to go to war against COVID. Require vaccination universally. Have the military run it. If you don’t want to get vaccinated, you better be ready to prove your conscientious objector status in court,” Cramer added. “And even then, you need to help in the war effort by staying at home until we finally beat this thing.”

I will say this: If you had forgotten about Jim Cramer in the days since “Mad Money” had cultural cachet — back 15 years ago, when a yelly-screamy, hypercaffeinated stock picker with a sound-effects board that would make an FM morning zoo host drool was decidedly a novelty — he certainly reminded you of who he was. Probably not in a good way, however — although, as he emphasized, he was just doing what Ike would have done back in the polio vaccine days.

Cramer’s view on polio vaccines is very much what a Wikipedia editor might refer to as [citation needed], inasmuch as he didn’t provide evidence of a martial vaccine mandate or neighborhood snitches, and a desultory search didn’t seem to provide one. But I digress and pick up our story on Monday, when Cramer had an announcement:


The Twitter take on the positive test — aside from the messages of support, obviously — was some permutation of this response from right-wing commentator Mike Cernovich:

The responses may have been nicer or nastier than that, but this is pretty much the pithy median of what Twitterers had to say about the positive test. If only the military had been doing its job, maybe they would have jabbed him with a fourth booster for good measure.

And, yes, omicron obviously evades some of vaccine’s protections against infection, although early data seems to show vaccination will make breakthrough infections milder. Then again, early data also shows omicron itself is milder, but it’s too early to come to any definitive conclusion, especially given the South African cohort we’re using to come to these conclusions is significantly different than population distribution in the Americas and Western Europe — both in terms of vaccination status, prior infection, age and comorbidities.

You’ve heard this all before — and it still doesn’t have much to do with the reason we’re here, which is that one of the media’s most aggressive vaccine scolds has gotten COVID after being triply-vaccinated and he’s about to reap a whirlwind of backlash.

His responses to online critics were a bit more magnanimous than one might expect given his Nov. 29 performance — although, given the situation, it’s hard to see how they wouldn’t be. For several of them, he said the vaccine was saving him from serious symptoms and brought out his “Jimmy Chill” persona to demonstrate he wasn’t upset:

For those that don’t get the “Jimmy Chill” reference Cramer is making: It may surprise you, but the same guy who was calling for the military to start putting shots in the arms of the stragglers who got ratted out by their neighbors has actually calmed down over the years.

Consider this clip in which 2016-era “Jimmy Chill” Cramer explains 2008-era “James De Cidedly-Unchill” going off about the Federal Reserve in one of his most legendary viral clips from before he stopped “going Philly”:



Sure, Jimmy Chill wants the military deployed in America, but at least his febrile mind now drives a more equable mouth when he talks about Marines toting Moderna instead of M-16s and being deployed to Fayetville, Arkansas, not Fallujah.

We all wish “Jimmy Chill” well as he battles COVID-19, no matter how minor the battle seems to be. Perhaps, it’s because he’s vaccinated. Perhaps, it’s because he has omicron, which can evade vaccination defenses but may indeed be milder than delta or previous variants of SARS-CoV-2. We have no idea, and we wouldn’t want to speculate.

What we do know, however, is that he wanted to take away people’s right to get the vaccination on their own, and not just through a mandate. Oh, no — he wanted the military involved. Now, he seems a lot more chill about things than he did late last month — or “Jimmy Chill,” if you prefer.

Too bad his alter-ego didn’t make an appearance on that show, when he suggested a force designed to repel America’s enemies overseas be used to treat people who didn’t want to get the vaccine as if they were enemies on the home front — particularly as omicron seems ready to shift COVID into a pandemic of the vaccinated.