If you’re impatient with the hypocrisy of politicians and media figures and you’re not reading Salon’s Alex Pareene, well, you really should be. Having specialized of late in a distinctive,no-holds-barred, high-octane brand of takedown of those who most need taking down, he may be the only writer at Salon worth reading. (The topic’s lost interest, of course, but you can get a big taste of his sensibility in his Rude Guide to Mitt, released during the 2012 campaign.)

So it was quite a thrill to learn that Pareene paid the studios of CNBC a visit last Friday. I avoid CNBC due their insufferably warped and platitudinous self-regard, all of which would be quite well and good if they weren’t such blatant shills for the New Gilded Age and everything connected with it. One of the most objectionable things about the Wall St. mentality, quite apart from the occasional bouts of economy-destroying greed and dishonesty, is the smug assurance that they and they alone understand how the world works and that every other yardstick available can easily be shown to be wanting by reference to the massive piles of cash in the vicinity.

Pareene is precisely the person from whom the likes of CNBC most needs to hear—not that they are actually capable of hearing him. His visit was a masterpiece of unintentional black comedy—I would compare it to Sasha Baron Cohen, but Pareene scarcely had to say anything to elicit oodles of ill-considered, self-justificatory blather. Just a few intimations to the effect that Jamie Dimon, having admitting that the company of which he is CEO, JPMorgan Chase, will probably have to pay untold billions of dollars in fines, has likely demonstrated himself to be unfit to run such an important firm, and the other panelists, Dimon apologists all, could hardly restrain themselves from blustering that clearly Pareene didn’t understand anything and look at all the money JPMorgan Chase is generating and don’t stockholders all like that sort of thing?

There’s no better or more economical way of witnessing “the divide between the finance media bubble and the normals,” as Kevin Roose tweeted, than by watching the video below. The interview started with the following exchange and just got better and better once they let some Fortune employee named Duff McDonald open his yap.

Maria Bartiromo: Alex, to you first. Legal problems aside, JP Morgan remains one of the best, if not the best performing major bank in the world today. You believe the leader of that bank should step down?

Alex Pareene: I think that any time you’re looking at the greatest fine in the history of Wall Street regulation, it’s really worth asking should this guy stay in his job. In any other industry — I can’t think of another industry. If you managed a restaurant, and it got the biggest health department fine in the history of restaurants, no one would say “Yeah, but the restaurant’s making a lot of money. There’s only a little bit of poison in the food.”

The best thing about the clip is that Pareene has the good sense not to be bothered by the inanity of his co-panelists—he just smiles and brushes it off.

Two more quick observations and then I’ll leave you to enjoy this masterpiece of satire-in-action. First, after McDonald hears the above exchange, he instantly sneers that Pareene “obviously got attention with this article,” as if Pareene is some opportunistic stringer looking to make his name—uh, Duff, who the fuck do you think you’re talking about? Alex Pareene writes brilliantly scathing (and very difficult to controvert) articles about all sorts of people in the media and political worlds—that’s just what he does, and he’s damn good at it.

Second: there’s something rather touching about Maria Bartiromo’s snorts of contempt directed at The New York Times about halfway through: The poor woman actually thinks that she works for a news organization!
 

 
via Felix Salmon

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Occupy Wall Street: One of the 1% in solidarity with the 99%
Who will be ‘the Bob Dylan of Occupy Wall Street’?