Posted by Niall O'Dowd at 6/10/2009 9:30 PM EDT

The news for CNN anchor Lou Dobbs is grim. The racist anti-immigrant CNN host is plunging in the ratings.- and he has just been fired from his 9 P.M repeat show slot on Headline News replaced by Joy Behar.

It couldn't happen to a nicer guy!

In the month of May alone, Dobbs was down 29 percent in the ratings on CNN and way down on Headline News, which repeats his show but won't for much longer. Indeed, on Friday June 5, both of Sour Lou's shows finished fourth out of four stations, according to The New York Observer.

How sweet it is.

But what happened?

"I don't know if its true in Dobbs' case, but sometimes people just tire of acts," respected writer Ken Auletta told the Observer. Auletta had done a profile of Dobbs for the New Yorker -- he knew a phony when he saw one.

Lou made a living for a long time slamming immigrants, and it played well when the immigration issue was center stage. Now that it is not, Lou is revealed as a one-trick pony, a phony faux populist who retired to his 300-acre horse ranch in New Jersey every night laughing at the rednecks who once lapped him up as the real thing.

Dobbs is as much the real thing as "new Coke" was. He's a complete phony start to finish. He used fear and demonization of immigrants to drive ratings, and CNN, to their eternal shame went right along with it.

Remember the claim that immigrants brought in 70,000 cases of leprosy with them to America over three years? Even Lou had to admit that was wrong. It was actually 70,000 over 30 years and the overwhelming majority of lepers were from the Good Old U.S.A., not from south of the border.

Night after night he demonized Hispanics, praised the vigilantes and generally became the 21st century voice of the Know-Nothings, the anti-immigrant group who persecuted our Irish forefathers after the Famine.

Now he's the guy running from reality.

One-trick ponies usually don't get very far. CNN should drop him pronto -- that's Spanish for "quick," Lou.