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CNN’s Rick Sanchez Goes All Daily Show on Bill O’Reilly

This afternoon, when anchor (and Twitter abuser) Rick Sanchez got fed up with a bogus accusation Bill O’Reilly made against his network, CNN, he went on the counterattack. The short version is this: O’Reilly claimed that CNN didn’t cover the the murder of Arkansas Army recruiter William Long on Monday until Anderson Cooper’s 10 p.m. program. This was untrue: The network had covered it pretty steadily all day after it was originally reported. It strikes us that when these news anchors play “Gotcha!” with one another, the subject matter of the debate is never really that interesting or memorable. It’s just the childishness and glee with which they go at each other. Olbermann and O’Reilly are sort of the unofficial captains of the left- (MSNBC) and right-wing (Fox News) teams in this battle — and CNN usually stays out of it. (The Daily Show does it better than anybody, mostly because they’re supposed to act like children.) But today Sanchez waded in and eviscerated O’Reilly. After showing Kyra Phillips, Tony Harris, Heidi Collins, Lou Dobbs, David Mattingly, Wolf Blitzer, Kiran Chetry, and Sanchez himself reporting on the story, the anchor cracked: “That last guy there, if he was Anderson Cooper, Anderson Cooper’s looking very Cuban these days.” He went on to snipe, “It doesn’t matter what really happened. It doesn’t matter what the record shows. All that matters is what Bill thinks he saw.” Aw. Funny! Now quit while you’re ahead, Sanchez, because this routine can turn you into a blowhard faster than you can say “Countdown Factor!”

CNN’s Rick Sanchez Goes All Daily Show on Bill O’Reilly