Dickgate (The Other Dickgate)

How nice. They don't want to morph in the direction of Fox News, where Beck and Rush regularly call him a "Nazi". Though I guess "Nazi" is a political statement, where "dick" is a playground body-part insult.

I thought it was only moderates and liberals who got fired for calling people names.

On the other hand, this IS consistent with the "moderate to liberal commentator saying ONE WORD that's objectionable, IMMEDIATELY apologizing, then being suspended and perhaps fired eventually anyway" syndrome.

This IS preposterous. Please RESCIND, MSNBC.

Juan Williams IS a liberal?

I guess I'm the only person who thinks that when Obama referred to the questions about the Libya war's legality as only a bunch of "noise," he WAS being kinda....

No Lib, Juan Williams is the, well, that body part in question.

I support the decision to suspend Halpern. I think the political discourse has been degenerating over the past two decades, with the sense of decorum and respect going down the toilet. If this is an early step towards moving ourselves away from a "Breitbart-all-the-time" type of circus news, then so much the better.

As much as I disliked Reagan, I would have similarly supported suspending a professional news person who called Reagan a dick on national television.

Now, don't get me wrong, I totally support Halpern savagely tearing apart any perceived flaws in Obama's rhetoric. Let Halpern say that obviously taxes should be cut, it's a wonderful idea to cut Medicare, or what have you. That's fine. But it should be "Mr. President, your ideas are faulty and without substance" and NOT "dickhead, your ideas or faulty and without substance".

It's difficult to determine appropriate punishments. MSNBC and other networks do not want boycotts by those who are self described Friends of Barak. Halperin has been an intelligent commentator and I understand HBO is doing a movie of his book. He won't suffer too badly.

I think you're missing the point here. Do you bring up Donald Trump for comparison because he was (sort of) running for president? Because I think he's an interesting figure in this context.

To me, the Donald Trump pseudo-candidacy is a symptom of the same problem that allows the brain of some third-rate pundit to even entertain the idea of calling the President of the United States a "dick". That is, the level of political discourse has sunk so low that a joke like Trump can be talked about semi-seriously and "dick" jokes seem appropriate on national TV.

I'll withhold opinion on whether commentators owe the president (or at least the office of the president) some respect. However, they absolutely owe respect to their audience, and they have a duty to uphold the quality and seriousness of political argument in this country.

I think the same people who would seriously consider a Trump, Palin, or Bachmann presidency would also consider "you're a dick" to be a valid and candidly honest debate counterargument. When the media descends into the same type of lazy thinking, it makes that trio seem more legitimate by comparison.

For the rest of us however, MSNBC has to fire Halperin if they want to be considered more than a joke.

Two kinds of problems with what Halperin did. First, it's good for the nets to stay out of the gutter; you don't call the President a "prick" on air. This isn't about deeming the President a monarch. Charles Krauthammer and George Will go at Obama hammer and tongs without calling him a "prick", and nobody calls for their heads. You want major media to set a standard for language and analysis that rises about the level of schoolyard taunts. Call me elitist, but I think it's a standard worth observing.

Also - and this is at least as important - Halperin doesn't present himself as a Krauthammer or a Will. He sells himself as a neutral observer of politics - someone who doesn't take sides. Now he's outed his visceral dislike of the President. If he wants to pop up again as a Republican or conservative commentator, he'll get (and deserve) more leeway to bash the PotUS- everyone will know that he's got a bias and his goal is to make the case against the President. Once you've called the President a "prick" on air, you can't expect to be trusted as a source of unbiased information about him.

I'm pretty sure Joe didn't bring him on to talk about how wonderful of a job Obama has been doing. He just got a little carried away in the casual atmosphere. Can't say I'm terribly surprised; these days the only people that bad mouth Obama more than conservatives are the liberals. Getting the two together is a recipe for disaster. At least we know how he really feels.
I have to agree, MSNBC is trying a little too hard on this one. Indefinite suspension is awfully harsh. They need to quit trying to enforce political correctness; it's like they're overreacting to appease the PC police before anything nasty happens.

oh man I cannot WAIT to hear what Rachel Maddow calls President Bachmann

I don’t know, maybe I’m just old, but I could see a TV news organization suspending a journalist for calling anyone a dick on the air, just cause it sounds so unprofessional for a TV news organization and could really offend a lot of viewers.

But, yeah, it was probably more likely because it was the President. Most people think the President should be treated with more respect than other citizens just because of the office. And always keep in mind, journalism companies have a very strong profit motive and no subsidization for ginormous externalities. They have a strong incentive to suspend just not to lose viewers and profits.

I'm going to pretend I didn't read Jon say "The merits of Halperin's political commentary skills aside." That way I'm free to point out that Halperin is far from "an intelligent commentator," as mentioned above. He's flat-out terrible -- a purveyor of the worst sort of conventional "wisdom" and idiotic "the GOP committed murder, but the Dems jaywalked so they're both criminals" both-houses pox-declaring. And he's been remarkably bad at hiding his right-wing leanings up to now. Despite being in trouble with MSNBC, he must feel incredibly liberated today, finally getting that off his chest.

I really don't see why a suspension is over the line for him here. He's not fired from the network. He's not in trouble for criticizing the president, he's in trouble for using a vulgar epithet. Despite agreeing with his evaluation of Obama, my 81-year-old mother would practically faint dead away if she heard that word (in that context) come out of her television speakers.

Liberals are free-speechers until .... someone pops off at the Darling. You mangy hypocrites.

@liberalref- Speaking for myself, the point was not about free speech. Halpern is free to criticize the president's policies till the cows come home. Hence, Halpern can say "the president's speech was hypocritical and his ideas are counterproductive", but not "the dickhead's speech was hypocritical and his ideas counterproductive".

Heck, he can even say 'the dickhead's speech was counterprodcutive..." if he's just speaking as a private citizen, but NOT if he is saying it as a professional on national TV.

I suspect you are just being argumentative. It is doubtful that if your doctor told you "hey dickhead, stop eating so many donuts" that you'd tell yourself, 'well, he wasn't being unprofessional--after all, he didn't violate his first amendment rights!'.

Just how many of you would support this suspension if it were five years ago and George Walker Bush were in office and the target? About zero, I surmise.

Above, my "the" should have been "their."

I know, I know, it's never about free speech, it's about standards. Please spare me.

Go Jonathan.

Let me second Sokol's remarks. It's not what he called the President that matters (although I believe that we should all try to maintain a certain level of comity) but that he is being employed as a commentator, an expert witness, if you will. Calling the President a name is the cheapest and laziest sort of commentary. For not doing his job, for compromising his analysis for now and for ever more, he should be suspended. Let's suspend them all I say. Not for insulting the president but for doing a lousy job. For the money they make, anyone on this blog (except for the name callers) could do a better job.

Mark Halperin probably knows a dick when he sees one since he's been sucking on Mitt Romney's for some time now.

Anyone who reads Halperin knows he doesn't like Obama, he favors conservative Republicans who are not completely out of their tiny minds [Mitt Romney]. That doesn't really matter. What Halperin did isn't a firing offense, but if MSNBC wants to maintain a certain level of dignity on their network a suspension doesn't seem out of order. CNN suspended Robert Novak for uttering an obscenity and walking off the set on live TV and that seems about right to me. It'll be a quick and perfunctory suspension, as it should be, for an offense that was unseemly, but hardly serious.

Don't worry, Halperin fans. In short order your boy will be back to bore us to tears with his endless recitations of Beltway CW.

If Halperin were a random guest on MSNBC, then I wouldn't care, but I can't call anyone a Dick where I work. Does this guy have any sense of decorum? It has nothing to do with Obama either.
Calling someone a dick is lazy and childish.
Libref, of course it is about standards. I never call my students idiots or dicks. I would never allow one of my students to call me a dick. What they say privately is not my business but I never allow such language in my classroom.
And if I worked at MSNBC and got on air, I would never call Bachmann a crazy bitch, not if I wanted to keep my job. Even here if I call her a crazy bitch I would get nailed, not for the crazy part but for the bitch part.

And can you pull up a single instance of George Bush being called a Dick by any network broadcaster, not some random guest but an employee. Or called an idiot, or an ass, or anything of the sort.

You bring up as a counter example something that never happened, and then you claim we would have had no problem with it.

That is just amazing.

But libref, whenever someone around here fires off a vulgar word you're usually right there to tsk-tsk and bemoan the decline of comity and standards. I know you're a phony "pox on both houses" militant much like Halperin (even if you're not as conservative), but even so your hypocrisy here is a little surprising. Particularly since you've strapped on your "liberals are hypocrites" hat. You can't blast hypocrites by employing hypocrisy!

I purposefully avoided the "imagine if this happened while Bush was in office" construct because it's so cliche, but since you plunged in head-first, I'll play along: We'd be having a different discussion because the hypothetical commentator who called Bush a 'dick' would have been fired by now, not suspended. The most unflattering photo available of that hypothetical commentator would be taking up the entire lead news hole of Drudge's website, Breitbart would have augmented the video clip with fart noises, and the Right Wing Freak Machine would howl that the firing wasn't enough and the hypothetical commentator should never appear on the airwaves again.

And for the record, I don't "support" Halperin's suspension, but I certainly don't think it's unfair or unwarranted. I would feel the same way about the hypothetical commentator who called Bush a 'dick,' but I would have been up in arms when that hypothetical commentator was fired and ostracized, which is what would have happened in your Way-Back Machine scenario.

I just had another look at the video of Halperin calling Obama a dick and it confirms the suspension is correct. It's not like the word just slipped out. He previewed what he was going to say and Joe & Mika urged him on, promising to hit a 7-second delay button, which was never done. Of course, that misses the point of the delay button, which is intended to deal with unforeseen events. Halperin very deliberately called the Prez a dick. It wouldn't have changed the nature of what Halperin said if the delay button had been used properly. Halperin, Scarborough and Mika are all experienced vets in political broadcasting and it is pretty difficult to see how they didn't see a suspension coming from very carefully and deliberately choosing to all a sitting President of the United States a "dick" on live television.

To be fair to Halperin, you could make a good case Scarborough and Mika deserve a suspension for egging him on.

Finally, this has nothing to do with who is POTUS right now. Of course I'd believe the same thing if a Republican were in the White House. The standards for TV political commentary are pretty low already, which explains how Mark Halperin is employed in the first place. Halperin and Scarborough very carefully and deliberately lowered standards on MSNBC. If it's okay to call the POTUS [again, ANY POTUS] a "dick" on live TV today, I guess next week we can call the First Lady a "cocksucking slut."

Keeping that stuff off the public airwaves -- which are a privilege to use -- is common decency. People who object to good manners usually do so because they have none themselves. If political commentators cannot criticize the POTUS without calling him a "dick," then we need an entirely new class of political commentators.

I suspect Lib is being contrarian. I cannot understand how some of you think it's okay to call someone a dick on the air. Would it be okay to call him a fuckk? Or a fuckhead? Would it have been okay for a commentator to call Sarah Palin a bitch on the air when she said that Obama palled around with terrorists? If you all think so then we don't have a basis for conversation, but if all of those are not okay, then why is dick okay? If I were the president of MSNBC, Halperin would be out by now, or at least his termination papers would be in front of a review board by now.

And this is not about Obama. I was equally pissed when that Iraqi journalist threw a shoe at W during the press conference. For the first time, I felt outraged on his behalf rather than at him.

Dr. Bombay, I can't believe how dense you are sometimes. I haven't ever called for your suspension at TNR, nor would I support it if you were put in the cooler. In fact, I have repeatedly invited you over for dinner and claret. Despite our differences, I think we could have a jolly good time. But I don't expect to see you any time soon. Maybe about 2050?

libref, I don't get your point at all. It is a morning show. I have 3 young kids. If I have the morning news on while I get ready for work I don't want to have the term "dick" thrown around, especially not when the broadcaster is being paid millions to be a professional.
Luckily, I don't watch MSNBC, I watch CNN International and in 15 years have not heard any morning host call anyone a dick on air.
I have no idea as to the nature of his contract, he was suspended, he has not sued for being suspended...hence he must have violated the term of his own contract.

This is sexist. Michele Bachmann parlayed outrageous comments into a presidential bid. Palin not so much, but still made controversy for attention. For Ann Coulter, shocking statements are the only way to sell a book. I think if Halpern has a book, he should be allowed to show some underpants on national TV to get attention.

It's a question of respect for the office, if not the man.

If we were talking about the government stepping in and fining or imprisoning Halperin, that would be one thing. But I think MSNBC is well within its rights to want to take a higher tone, and discipline employees for not following that rule.

In a republic, it's important to remember that even if your party lost, the party that won has a legitimate right to govern and to set policy. A custom of speaking with respect of high elected officials encourages people to remember that. If you want to see what happens when it's forgotten, you need look no further than the 110th Congress.

To the Mexican Sage: If M. Halperin is the worst your children are ever exposed to, they will be lucky indeed. And how very interesting that the left Puritans and child-protectors only emerge when Barack Obama is the target. What about the foul pop culture that vastly exceeds Halperin's one-off? Almost nobody ever writes about that here. Hypocrisy as usual.

"To the Mexican Sage: If M. Halperin is the worst your children are ever exposed to, they will be lucky indeed. "

Anyway, if your children understand what "dick" is in THAT context, I think the anxiety about protecting them from foul language comes too late. The horse has already bolted from that stable... You can be assured that they hear much much worse on an hourly basis in school (hopefully not from the teachers... perhaps).

libref, so no standards at all? I don't let my kids watch a lot of TV programs and carefully monitor their internet use. If it were Bill Maher I wouldn't have cared at all because it is cable and late night. And why are you bloviating that this has anything to do with Obama. No one called Bush a dick so where is the hypocrisy? For there to be hypocrisy some national broadcaster would have had to have called Bush a dick and I and others would have had to say it was fine. You can't call someone a hypocrite for what you think they might have done in similar circumstances, it is presumptuous and arrogant.

And for the record, hell yeah he was kind of a dick during that press conference, I wish he were a bigger dick, the Republicans deserve to be treated like the aholes they are and to do that you have to be a dick.

Decorum borum, Chait's correct, if Haperin wants to call Obama a dick, he can. Most everything posted in response here is a matter of personal taste or private office workplace rules. Haperin's comment is editorial. It may be lowball, but it's editorial.

"It is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that our president is a tool."

I wrote that in Chait's Truman Show thread talking about the same press conference.

Would Halperin have been in less hot water if he'd said "tool" instead of "dick"?

With this publicly expressed heresy, I think America has finally crossed the Rubicon and entered into its genuinely post-racial era and it is all thanks to Obama.

Clever, Jonathan, clever.

Let’s acknowledge that the president “works for the American people.” Very well, but that concept is not relevant as Halperin works for the network, and if the network deems that he transgressed network policy, then yes, he deserves sanction.

This is a matter of professionalism. If the best commentary one could come up with – working for a national news outlet, no less – is to refer to the president, any president, as “a dick,” then perhaps that person should be better employed as one of the bully frat boy roles for “Revenge of the Nerds, Part III.”

The Mexican Sage sounds like a Republican. But only because a Democratic president was the target. And I certainly can shout "hypocrisy." I watch you people on a regular basis line up like iron filings on a magnet. Your "principles" and your "standards" work only against the other side, and are not applied to your own.

It is the same thing when it comes to my comments. I have been repeatedly scored for incivility here at TNR but not one of the cretins who has done so has ever taken roid down for swearing at people. When "standards" and "principles" become warped and one-sided, then it is evident that they are tactics, and not genuine standards and principles.

Disagree; I think things have gotten out of control. When people are busy being outrageous to each other we simply can't get past the ugly rhetoric and it becomes impossible to work together.

John Stewart pointed out last week that all these news commentators are doing a mediocre job at their real job (news) and an equally lousy job at entertainment. Calling the president a "dick" is trying to do both jobs and manages to demean both the subject of the slur and the person who uttered it. The problem with "news folks" on television (and frequently on blogs) is they are - as Stewart points out - out of their league as entertainers and not representing the league who hired them. The result is we get tabloid level political coverage that doesn't just lack substance, but can't even get the slyness and wit right. Infuriating. Fire the guy. He's an ass.

libref, Roid has a point. You are calling "hypocrite" where the only hypocracy evident is the hypocracy you imagine if the roles were reversed. And yet, we had 8 years of Bush the Lesser, complete with outrageous revenue giveaways, a justified war, an unjustified war, and the continued evisceration of America's infrastructure and middle class; many not-so-nice things were said, but no one in the lame stream repeatia ever called him anything vulgar live on national television.

Why do we allow parents to name their children "Dick" in this society?

After all, consider the discretion displayed by the Wife of Bath (as communicated by Chaucer and modern Englished a bit):

And why in all the books is it said

That the husband must pay his wife in bed?

And what should he use for the payment

If he doesn't use his privy instrument? . . .

==============

Now if Halperin had just said Obama is a "privy instrument" everything would be fine, right?

http://www.thestatecolumn.com/articles/david-axelrod-defends-mark-halperin/

David Axelrod does not think this was such a booboo and urges MSNBC to reconsidert heir decision, while according to White House Press Secretary Jay Carney "... the White House agrees with MSNBC’s decision to suspend Mr. Halperin."

"... the White House agrees with MSNBC’s decision to suspend Mr. Halperin." ??

It looks like MSNBC is not likely to heed Axelrod's advice.

Since when does the WH approve a decision made by a TV network about one of its analysts? Should it?