So much for ‘Reliable Sources’!

As a crusty, curmudgeonly original CNN special assignment correspondent from the early 1980s, I have used these pages more than once to vent about the second-rate dingbats who have populated my old network over the past quarter-century.

You know them: cockwomble Chris Cuomo, blowhard Don Lemon, lumbering harpy Candy Crowley — a parade of television solemnity occasionally interrupted by journalism.

I spent enough of my career pulling leeches off myself in Nicaragua to admit I have an old-school correspondent’s prejudice against television interviews conducted in hermetically controlled studios.

But few CNN creatures trigger my counter-alimentation reflex faster than Brian Stelter, whose talent for institutional obsequiousness survived even the departure of his long-cashiered former boss, Jeff “Mother” Zucker.

Stelter was bounced during the Zucker debacle, then rehired in a fit