Misplaced Modifiers

As the financial crisis grew, even Jim Cramer found it hard to explain.

-The Times

In the absence of that even, it would be a perfectly reasonable sentence. With it in there, the implication seems to be that Jim Cramer, a performance artist on CNBC, is generally in the business of explication. I mean, here's a guy whose job it is to get boneheaded "day traders and market buffs" to throw more of their money into the various schemes that populated Wall Street and its satellites right up to the big kablooey in which we currently reside. He pimped get-rich-quick con games to inadequate white dudes who could just as profitably spent their time with black folk and old people playing their numbers at the convenience store. He represented the glib post-industrial, debtor-economy assurance that something would always come from nothing. The ability to deploy jargon is not the same as understanding, let alone expertise, and since I, a refugee from the Humanities, schooled in useless effluvia like the poetry of Donne and the cultcrit nonsense of a lot of grand Europeans, am perfectly able to explain the roots and progression of the current state of affairs in terms almost any moron can understand, we are left with three possible conclusions: a.) that Jim Cramer is no ordinary moron; b.) that Jim Cramer, and financial media in general, are still carrying water for their masters; and c.) both of the above.