MSNBC Suspends Mark Halperin for Saying What Everyone Thinks

RUSH: Mark Halperin on MSNBC this morning on the Scarborough show. Everybody’s digging this, folks. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up. I mean it’s climbing, NASDAQ is up 33, the DJI is up 145. The S&P is up 12. Everybody’s out there — 143 now for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Play it again. Everybody’s talking about it because everybody thought the same thing.

HALPERIN: The president was posturing. What Republicans have on their side now is they think that if the deadline doesn’t get met, that the president’s gonna get the blame. The economy will be in chaos, perhaps, the president will get the blame. He went out yesterday and I don’t think did anything to encourage a deal. He might think, by having more leverage, making his case for why the shutdown, default should be blamed on the Republicans, maybe he thinks in the long term that will get him more leverage.

RUSH: Now, after they stopped giggling on the Scarborough show, Halperin made a good point. Obama does not want a deal. He really doesn’t want a deal. He wants the chaos. He wants all this to continue and that’s what generates happiness for him. Here, I meant audio sound bite one to be played again here. Cookie called me today, “Should we edit it out?” I said, “Well, no. I mean they said it; I didn’t. Everybody’s thinking it, but they said it.” So here it is again.

HALPERIN: Are we on the seven-second delay today? I wanted to characterize how I thought the President behaved. … I thought he was kind of a dick yesterday.

RUSH: Mark Halperin, of TIME Magazine. Now, he has apologized. This is audio sound bite number three.

HALPERIN: What I said was disrespectful to the president and the office but it also lowers our discourse, not appropriate on any level. I’m sorry.

RUSH: Yeah. Terribly sorry, ladies and gentlemen, calling the president what he called him. And the Scarborough crew, I mean they were panicking, they were tripping over themselves to apologize to Obama, led off here by Mika Brzezinski.

BRZEZINSKI: We laughed because we did not think it was on the air.

SCARBOROUGH: This was a mistake on a variety of levels. We all share it and we all apologize.

GEIST: Today there was a slip by Mark Halperin. He’s a great reporter. He didn’t intend to say it on television. We apologize.

SCARBOROUGH: We had a little technical glitch and mistake and a couple mistakes were made.

RUSH: Technical glitch? He didn’t intend to say it on television? He was on television. He was sitting there on television. He didn’t intend to say it on television. They’re just bending over backwards, bending over forwards. To show you that he intended to say it, go back to sound bite one. He’s asking if they have a seven-second delay. And they do. MSNBC has a seven-second delay. But they got a new tech board op who didn’t know how to do it. That’s the excuse. That their producer did not know how to deploy the seven-second delay. What preceded this, Scarborough had a little bit of a question. He said, “What was the president’s strategy yesterday? We’re coming up on a deadline, the president decided to please his base, push back against the Republicans. I guess the question is, is this showmanship? A lot of times you go up there, both sides, they act tough so their base will be appeased and then they quietly work the deal behind the scenes.”

HALPERIN: Are we on the seven-second delay today? I wanted to characterize how I thought the President behaved. … I thought he was kind of a dick yesterday.

RUSH: So he wanted to say it, and he wanted it said, and he wanted those people on the crew to know that he said it. He wanted them to hear it but he also didn’t want the audience to hear it. That’s why he asked, “Are we on a seven-second delay?” He expected it to be bleeped as it were. And think of the grief that I got for calling Obama a jackass back in the day. Remember that? Now, let me ask you a question. If Mark Halperin had said this about, say, George W. Bush, would they be falling all over themselves to apologize? No. My guess is that new ground had been broken, finally, they would say, a reporter has had the courage and the guts to tell the nation just exactly the kind of president we have, a gutsy move. It might have been over the line, it might have been a little bit risky, and it might be something he would never do again, but by golly, by gosh, that’s how they would play it, had Mark Halperin said it about George W. Bush.

Scarborough says mistakes were made. Scarborough went on to talk about this producer and apparently scolded the producer on air. “Hey, look, you gotta get it right here, we do things –” no, you don’t. This is MSNBC we’re talking about. So blaming the producer. The media never had trouble calling Nixon a Dick. They called him Dick Nixon all the time. Nobody ever said a word about it. Tricky Dick, Dick Nixon all over the place. Now it’s, you know, Dick Obama. We got Joe Bite Me. We got Dick Obama. We got mistakes having been made. There was a seven-second delay that wasn’t deployed. The media never had any problem calling Cheney a Dick, Dick Cheney here, Dick Cheney over there, I mean it’s just selective. (interruption) Well, Dick Hussein Obama. We got tricky Dick Nixon. You got Dick Nixon. You got Dick Cheney. Dick Obama. (laughing)

I’ll tell you what, Weiner fits into all this. Weiner’s gone for two weeks now. He’s in intense rehab. Weiner’s in dick rehab and Huma has vanished. Huma has gone on a sabbatical, a retreat. Huma has retreated. She’s retreated from Hillary. She’s retreated from Weiner. She’s somewhere where her family is said to be watching her like a hawk. You know, she’s 35 and she’s pregnant. She’s carrying Weiner’s child.

There’s no reaction yet from the White House on Mark Halperin referring to the president as tricky Dick Obama.

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