"It wasn't me" says Cramer

In his hit song Wasn't Me, a friend seeks advice from Shaggy about what he should tell his girlfriend after she caught him cheating on her. Shaggy's advice is classic: Just say it wasn't you.

When Jim Cramer went on Don Imus's show on Thursday to discuss comments that he'd made in an interview on TheStreet.com, he borrowed a line from the Shaggy playbook. Last week, in a widely publicized interview, he described spreading false information to a "bozo reporter" at the Wall Street Journal to drive the share price down in stocks he was short. He described using manipulative trading techniques to create the appearance of movement, which he said was blatantly illegal, but that the SEC didn't understand it. "No one else in the world would ever admit it," he said of the methods, "but I don't care."

On the Imus show, Cramer's backtracking was pathetic. He said he had misspoken, refused to name the "bozo reporter," and said he had never done any of the things he said he'd done in the interview, and didn't believe what he had said. Huh?

There are two possibilities here. The first is the Cramer was far too candid in the original interview and is backtracking to try to save his career and avoid offending people. Makes sense. The second possibility is that Cramer really didn't mean any of what he said -- he just went into some weird psychological state where he claimed to have broken the law but really didn't, and just made the whole thing up. In the words of Johnny Cochran: "That does not make sense."

In my opinion, Cramer's backtracking hurts his credibility. He should have stuck with his story, and said that he was sorry for what he'd done and was making up for it by educating the masses about how it works.