How to Commit Career Suicide: CNN Edition
CNN anchor Rick Sanchez's groveling, sniveling, deeply pained apology hasn't yet materialized, but you can expect one by this afternoon at the latest. Appearing on an XM/Sirius radio program yesterday, the hypersensitive host denounced Jon Stewart, who has taken his fair share of shots at Sanchez over the years, as an anti-Hispanic racist who hates that "someone of my ilk is, almost, at his level." It's a bizarre, scattershot rant, in which Sanchez whimpers that he is a "complex human being" not worthy of mockery and claims both that he is viewed both as a token Hispanic and a token liberal Hispanic. It's all very confusing:
This is the game they play. "I just picked on Fox News, because they just had a bold-faced [sic] lie about something — dammit, that means I gotta find something on CNN. Oh, I know… wait, hold on, let me find, oh that Rick Sanchez, that little Puerto Rican guy. I'll make fun of him. Do you have anything?"
As the conversation descends to the really and truly stupid (the host says that Stewart can't possibly be racist against Cubans because he is Jewish), Sanchez fiddles with his career's self-destruct button. Not content to let Oliver Stone have all fun, he says that Jews have it made because they run the media, while poor Cubans from Miami have to work hard to get ahead. It's like Crown Heights all over again, but without all those meddlesome poor people:
Very powerless people… [snickers] He's such a minority, I mean, you know [sarcastically]… Please. What, are you kidding? … I'm telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah. [sarcastically]
Sanchez has a finely calibrated sense of ethnic and racial bias. Last year, he called Hispanics working for Fox News, like Julie Banderas and Geraldo Rivera, "sellouts." And those of you who have ever invoked state's rights? You're probably racist too.
The whole rant here. It's worth listening to: