The deeply wrong Jim Cramer took to the airwaves this morning to defend himself against cruel vaudevillian Jon Stewart, telling the Today Show's Meredith Vieira that sometimes it's OK to be wrong.

After Vieira played a clip from last night's Daily Show of Cramer literally asking people to buy Bear Stearns in January 2008, when it was trading at about $24 per share, Cramer responded: "Did I make a mistake? Any time you recommend a stock and it goes down, you've made a mistake. Here's a shocker: Almost every stock is down!"

But it's OK because Cramer also came on the Today Show last October and boldly told everybody to sell everything, saving "a lot of people a lot of money" (except anybody who bought Bear Stearns when he said to, because it was purchased at $2 per share in March 2008):

On October 6, 2008 I came on this show and...said people should sell everything. But that was 35 percent ago. Whatever [Stewart] says, Bear Stearns this or that, that was a call that should have wrecked my career. And it would have, if stocks had gone up. But it didn't and I save a lot of people money.

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Poor exasperated Cramer doesn't seem to understand why everybody's hassling him when all he's doing is his job, which is to predict the future! "Jim has to go out every day and make these calls," said his CNBC colleague Erin Burnett, leaping to his defense. He has to! You can't expect him to be correct all the time.

Cramer also appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe, where Mike Barnacle—who learned something about the carping of the vicious pundit class when he was forced to resign from the Boston Globe after lying about black kids with cancer in his treacly column—delivered a moving soliloquy about the slings and arrows suffered by the brave souls who do "five live hours a week":

No profession is more self-absorbed than the media... You're not going to get e-mails saying, "Great job, Jim, last night," so much as you're gonna get 10 times the number of e-mails saying, "You're a jerk...." You can pick and choose what any of us say, and go to the negative on it. And it feeds the beast.

Stop picking and choosing!