I'm weary to the point of extreme crabbiness of hearing Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, and the rest of the too-well-coifed CNN gang say that one bit of overproduced reality or another is brought to me by "the best political team on television." It's like having a used car salesman follow me around the lot.

I'm not the first to note how annoying this is. Slate's Jack Shafer mocked CNN a couple of months ago for treating us like a bunch of drooling idiots who will believe any stupid catchphrase if it is hammered into our heads often enough. To the contrary, he argues, the practice actually causes the sane mind to wonder about "the truth value and the earnestness of the whole enterprise."

Two years ago, the Columbia Journalism Review offered similar criticism. I guess I wasn't paying attention to their election coverage back then. "CNN’s robotically-repeated catchphrase is best delivered, we think, with a dose of self-deprecation," wrote Edward Colby. If only there was a hint of that in the self-important tone of the best news team.

And a few weeks ago, marketing blogger David Meerman Scott was also put off by the relentlessness of the slogan. He did a quick search of CNN transcripts and found that the phrase had been used on-air "about 200 times in the past 30 days and 16 times on Super Tuesday alone."

The ears bleed at the mere contemplation.

Scott continues, "Attention Wolf Blitzer and CNN: It's time to retire that stupid phrase." 

Hear, hear.