Is Mark Halperin a dick?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

As you may have heard, Mark Halperin, of Time and MSNBC fame, a bona fide Beltway insider (for better but usually for worse), said this about President Obama on Thursday (on Morning Joe):

I thought he was a dick yesterday.

Okay. Whatever. Big deal.

He apparently didn't think his words would hit the airwaves (given the seven-second delay).

Everyone's entitled to an opinion and this was hardly an egregious overstep. Everyone can be a "dick" now and then. Including the president. (Though I watched Obama's news conference and found him to be anything but.)

Halperin apologized, as he ought to have done -- as he had to: "Joking aside, this is an absolute apology. I shouldn't have said it. I apologize to the president and the viewers who heard me say that."

And yet was suspended by MSNBC. Perhaps understandably so.

The thing is, it's not what he said that's the problem, it's who he is, or, rather, what he represents, what sort of a "journalist" he is.

The Daily Caller's Michelle Goldberg hit the nail squarely on the head:

Here’s why Mark Halperin is a disgrace. It’s not because he used a mild obscenity to describe our president on Morning Joe, disrespectful as that was. Rather, it was the circumstances of the slur. Right now, the Republican Party is threatening to blow up the world economy unless Democrats agree to savage cuts in spending while refusing any of the revenue increases that all serious economists say are necessary to actually address the national debt. Obama, whose greatest fault in office has been a misplaced faith in the GOP’s capacity for reasonableness, went on television and chided the party for this stance. Apparently, this struck Halperin as unreasonable. His response embodies all that’s rotten and shallow about D.C.’s pundit class, which fetishizes bipartisanship even as it only demands it of one political party.

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Halperin should be forgiven for insulting the president. He shouldn’t be forgiven, though, for his role in perpetuating the idiotic assumptions of the establishment clique that lefty bloggers sometimes call The Village.

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He’s part of a political class that has become so cowed by conservative attacks that it makes anti-liberalism its lodestar, constantly imputing strength to the right and weakness to the left.

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Because Halperin is so determined to bend over backward for the right, he can’t come to grips with the central fact of modern politics—the death of Republican moderation. Today’s GOP is a congeries of Birchers, fundamentalists, nativists, and gold bugs that considers longtime conservatives like Bob Bennett and Orrin Hatch unacceptably left-wing. Right now, it is playing a game of chicken with all of our financial futures, counting on the widespread fear that it really is crazy enough to unleash financial Armageddon, and the knowledge that the Democrats are not. The president tried, in a very mild way, to address his opponents’ dangerous intransigence. What kind of political journalist regards that as wildly inappropriate? Halperin has given us the answer.

I could not agree more. Shame on Mark Halperin. Shame on all those like him. Which is almost the entirety of the Beltway media establishment.

America suffers as a result of its distorted priorities, its willingness to play along with Republican bullshit, its inability to do its job properly.

Halperin is just part of the problem, one among many. But with his "dick" remark he encapsulated all that is wrong with this oh-so-influential corner of the media.

Ed Schultz calls Laura Ingraham a "right-wing slut," conservatives freak out

By Michael J.W. Stickings

This one's pretty simple.

While I can't stand right-wing talk-radio extremist Laura Ingraham, it was clearly wrong for MSNBC's Ed Schultz, also on talk radio, to call her a "right-wing slut."

There are many things Ingraham could justifiably be called, but this was, to say the least, highly inappropriate.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it amounts to misogyny, but there's no excuse for it. It's obviously far worse than calling Republicans "bastards," as he did earlier this year. Such ad hominem slurs have no place in our society, including in our political discourse. Schultz should have known better, and spoken better.

And it was clearly right for MSNBC to suspend Schultz, if only for a week, which seems like an appropriate amount of time for such an offence.

But.

It is ridiculous that some on the right are trying to score partisan political points by using Schultz's remark to attack their opponents more broadly. Ingraham herself called it misogyny, as did Michelle Malkin.

When did these two ever care about misogyny? Or about insensitive speech generally?

How typical that conservatives go all politically correct when it suits them, that is, when someone on the left says something inappropriate, even just a stupid and fleeting remark, while excusing all manner of inappropriate (sexist, racist, homophobic, etc.) speech uttered by the likes of, say, Rush Limbaugh, or countless others on the right, where trafficking in bigotry is widespread?

Please.

Schultz deserves his punishment and should be ashamed of himself. But the right shouldn't be allowed to turn this into a weapon to attack the left and cover up its own proclivities. If you really want to hear bigotry, after all, you know where to turn.

Joe Scarborough says progressives didn't really want to take out bin Laden

By Richard K. Barry

Could Joe Scarborough be a bigger idiot? I have my doubts.

Each day after breakfast I turn on Morning Joe because I enjoy MSNBC's evening lineup and I assume, incorrectly, that the morning show will begin to approach the same level of discourse found on the network after 6:00 p.m. I am almost always disappointed, but I never seem to learn.

One of my favorite moments ever on the show was when Zbignew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor under Jimmy Carter, once referred to some choice analysis by Scarborough as "stunningly superficial and embarrassing." That pretty much sums up most things that come out of Joe's mouth.

The latest is Scarborough's opinion that Obama's successful mission to eliminate Osama bin Laden runs counter to the ideology of the president's base and even goes against the president's own ideological leanings.

Here's his statement:

Here, you know, I think Republicans should stand up and certainly salute Barack Obama for making some - again, for making some very tough choices that his own base did not want him to make. That takes courage, that takes leadership, and we saw the results of that courage and leadership saying no to his own base yesterday.

[These are] decisions that he probably did not believe as a candidate, he didn't think he'd have to make. Going against his own ideological leanings to do what he believes he has to do. 

What the fuck is he talking about?

The conceit of the right is so frequently that only they are capable of making hard choices and difficult decisions rooted in reality - that the "real world" is not a place in which progressives comfortably reside. And when progressives do make difficult decisions, it's somehow surprising.

Unlike Mr. Scarborough, I am not going to speak for all those who may consider themselves a part of Obama's base. As for myself, as a member of the club, I'm pretty proud of my president. I suspect a lot of other progressives feel the same way. The thing had to be done.

Having the ability to do the difficult tasks required as Commander-in-Chief is not a "right" and "left" thing. It's a leadership thing.

In the event that you want to be as annoyed as I am at the moment, here's the full clip:

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)