Man you missed CNN in the early 1990s. I used to watch Larry King interviews with my dad. He was so normal and direct and human.
I am by no means a defender of Blitzer--his interviews and his framing of issues show him to be a banal thinker--but I feel he received a lot of undeserved criticism for this utterance. Which seemed at the time to mostly come from bad-faith actors like Rush Limbaugh, taking a cheap shot.