Rick Sanchez calls Jon Stewart a "bigot," makes anti-Semitic remarks, and is fired by CNN

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I've always found (now ex-)CNN host Rick Sanchez to be something of a loose cannon, and yet sometimes an admirable one, but he completely lost it yesterday on Pete Dominick's radio show. "I think Jon Stewart's a bigot," he said, and Dominick, who used to work for The Daily Show doing audience warm-up, understandably asked him to explain:

Dominick: How is he a bigot?

Sanchez: I think he looks at the world through, his mom, who was a school teacher, and his dad, who was a physicist or something like that. Great, I'm so happy that he grew up in a suburban middle class New Jersey home with everything you could ever imagine.

Dominick: What group is he bigoted towards?

Sanchez: Everybody else who's not like him. Look at his show, I mean, what does he surround himself with?

Sanchez then changed "bigot" to "prejudicial" and "uninformed." And later in the show, he offered this gem:

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.

I love Jon Stewart, but I certainly don't think I need to defend him against these charges. He is obviously not a bigot or prejudicial, and he's extraordinarily well-informed.

You probably don't like him (to put it mildly) if you're Republican and/or conservative, but that's only because he tells it like it is and therefore makes you look bad.

But Sanchez? Was he just upset that Stewart makes fun of him from time to time? Well, he deserved to be made fun of, what with his on-air antics (remember when he had himself tasered?) and foot-in-mouth style. (I rarely ever watched his show, but I did sometimes find his eccentric approach a welcome departure from the usual media nonsense.)

Whatever the case, he obviously just lost it on Dominick's show, perhaps letting his inside voice come out, something a TV personality should be able to control, perhaps venting what had been building up for some time. It makes you wonder if he's either unstable or having problems in his personal or professional life.

Did he really think that attacking Jon Stewart would go unnoticed or that what he said was at all appropriate and that he'd be defended for speaking out like this?

Anyway, CNN has fired him -- and rightly so. It wasn't just his attack on Stewart, after all, it was his attack on CNN and his anti-Semitic remarks about Jews. Now, he may be right, more or less, that Jews are not an oppressed minority, but the sarcasm of his comment was inappropriate and it's just plain wrong that Jews run the media, a standard anti-Semitic accusation.

So he's either got a screw loose or he's a bigot himself -- or both. And that just isn't acceptable -- unless, of course, you work for Fox News, where it's all just par for the course.

**********

You can find a lot more reaction over at Memeorandum.

Update: Transcript at The Wrap.