Cruel, to boot

Whenever I think we've hit rock bottom, the Guardian always proves it can go lower still. In a column about Anna Nicole Smith, Alexander Chancellor writes:

Anna Nicole was described as being "absolutely devastated" by the loss of her son, "her pride and joy and an amazing human being". Daniel can hardly have been as amazing as his mother. Such a woman is hard to imagine existing anywhere but America. Where else could a woman achieve such fame and fortune on the strength of apparently nothing but surgically enhanced breasts?
[...]
I am finding it uphill work to share her grief.

William Sjostrom of AtlanticBlog comments:

Chancellor uses the death of someone he does not know, and has never, so far as he knows or is willing to admit, done him or anyone else any harm, as an occasion to vent bigotry and snobbery (he reminds me of Jane Austen's Lady Catherine) toward an essentially harmless woman he does not know, and of course Americans. Chancellor comes across as the sort of creep who would walk into a funeral and remark that the death was really no loss, because, after all, the man read tabloids. (And by the way, snot nose, Baywatch is the most watched TV series in the world, after being dropped in the US for low ratings.)

Apart from the revolting callousness of the feeling expressed, how ridiculous it sounds given my experience of British popular culture:

Where else could a woman achieve such fame and fortune on the strength of apparently nothing but surgically enhanced breasts?

What?! Well, how about in the UK, for one, where a dizzying array of ever-changing soap opera starlets and Big Brother winners (and runners up!) populate the newspapers, television and radio waves. Chantelle, anyone? Not that Italy is any better, mind.
And the point is not that we should welcome this phenomenon, but making it into a critique of the US in particular is breathtakingly idiotic.