My far too infrequent trips to the gym normally coincide with CNN’s Situation Room starring Wolf Blitzer and Jack Cafferty. If Wolf and Jack are to be believed, America goes down the toilet every day of the week only to reemerge each morning so that it can slip back down the toilet once again while they speculate on the sorry state of the economy and America’s incompetent politicians. If an alien landed in America and tuned in to CNN he would think that he had arrived in the worst country on earth.

I often think that it’s the kind of whingeing journalism that could only be produced in the richest, most powerful country in the world. And it gets even worse at 7pm when Lou Dobbs takes to the screen to rail against immigration and the “war on the middle class” while posing questions to his viewers that Gene Weingarten aptly summed up as: “Do you think America should forfeit its future by opening the borders to illegal, chimichanga-chomping busboys?”

It’s become so miserable lately that I have more than once ripped my headphones out of the socket and gone home feeling utterly depressed.

But it seems that Jack has finally gone too far by turning his wrath on the Chinese, describing their imports as junk and China as “the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years.” That might seem harmless to the Situation Room’s regular audience, who are used to Jack’s liberal use of slurs. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, it hasn’t gone down too well with the Chinese who have demanded an apology. (CNN, by the way, says Jack was referring only to the Chinese government as goons as thugs not its people. So that’s all right then.)

Not so long ago, Jack posed this question to his viewers: “Why do some politicians insist on sticking their feet in their mouths?” It couldn’t possibly be for the same reason commentators do, could it?

Related
China demands CNN to apologize for evil attack on Chinese people (China Central Television)
China Demands CNN Apologize for Commentary (NYT)