I emailed my Ukrainian friend (I don’t have any Russian ones) to see if there is some sort of Russian gesture that looks exactly like flipping someone the one gun salute. There isn’t apparently; they give the finger in a much more choreographed manner, I’m told, involving fists and the slapping of biceps. It certainly seems purposeful, as though she expected a western audience and the administration to see it, yes?

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The Old Media is still acting shocked, SHOCKED I tell you, that the Obama administration treats them like a redheaded stepchild. Newsweek’s The Daily Beast, for instance, is incredulous at the “reprehensible” actions of the Obama White House for having the temerity to call NBC to scold the cable outlet over Mark Halperin’s “dick” comment.

You’ll all certainly recall the incident in question. Back on June 30, MSNBC news analyst Mark Halperin unleashed the “d” word on President Obama in an appearance on the cable station’s “Morning Joe” talk show. Halperin was asked how he thought Obama did in his June 29 press conference and in reply Halperin joked that Obama had been “a dick.”

From there Halperin’s world went topsy turvy to the point where everyone was apologizing on the set of the TV show and only hours later MSNBC was suspending its analyst “indefinitely.”

But one other little part of this story is what brought the ire of Newsweek’s Douglas Schoen and Judith Miller and for good reason, too. The White House called NBC to complain about Halperin’s language. How is it possible, Newsweek wondered, that the White House was so bold as to attempt to intimidate NBC? Worse, why did NBC buckle under that pressure?

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“The GOP has become the Wahhabis of American government.”

“I think they’re the suicide bombers in all of this.”

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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On MSNBC’s, Morning Joe, political analyst / reporter / author Mark Halperin made what is known as a Kinsleyesque Gaffe. You see, Mark Halperin committed the ultimate sin for those who reside behind the Left’s Ideological Iron Curtain. He said what he really thought and it wasn’t kind to “the One.”

Halperin later apologized, sincerely – and with obvious fear for his career and standing in the Left’s eyes, to the President and all who heard him say what he clearly believed. Alas, that would not be enough. A couple of hours later MSNBC suspended Halperin indefinitely. (via MediaBistro.com)

A statement from MSNBC regarding TIME‘s Mark Halperin‘s role as an analyst after calling President Obama a “d*ck” on “Morning Joe” this morning:

Mark Halperin’s comments this morning were completely inappropriate and unacceptable. We apologize to the President, The White House and all of our viewers. We strive for a high level of discourse and comments like these have no place on our air. Therefore, Mark will be suspended indefinitely from his role as an analyst.

Hey Mark, you’ve just been Juan Williams-ed (h/t @TomMcCammon).

To borrow a favorite phrase from the President, let me be clear: All Halperin did was use the “D” word. And in the context of what he was talking about, the “D” word basically means “jerk.” It isn’t nearly as offensive as, say, Rachel Maddow’s ironic love affair with the word “teabagging” a couple of years ago. I mean, MSNBC clearly suspended Halperin because of the sexual connotation of the “D” word and not because he simply called the President a jerk, right? Because if it wasn’t about the sexual nature of the term, MSNBC just set a new standard for what is suspension-worthy. And if it was about the sexual nature of the term, Maddow and others at the network have dodged some bullets in the past – except for Ed Schultz, obviously, but he was really suspended for being a … well, dick.

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“Whatever action that network, any network, any newspaper might take, that’s not for us to decide.”

So as long as that media outlet isn’t a car plant or Boeing, the administration won’t barge in and tell them how to run their business. Good to know.

I’m curious as to whether or not the Obama administration ever privately admonished members of its party when they said similar, if not worse, about American voters? I never heard any public admonishment of Nancy Pelosi when she suggested that tea partiers were Nazis; or of Representatives John Lewis and Andre Carson when they slandered grassroots voters with a debunked and offensive accusation; or when Janet Napolitano put everyday grassroots Americans on the DHS watch list (I could go on at length but we’ll stop here); which makes me wonder if the White House did so privately. Regardless, we never received an apology.

Excuse me if I disregard the left’s outrage, the same side that screamed obscenities at a 14-year-old as she spoke during a pro-Walker Wisconsin rally; the same side who blamed the Tucson massacre on conservatives before the networks could accurately report whether or not Gabrielle Giffords’ was still alive (an action which caused Arizona tea partiers and Sarah Palin to get a wave of death threats). You all on the left act surprised at how much your #newtone has grown!

It’s hysterical to think that “dick” is an obscenity or that it in any way trumps the left’s verbiage the past several years; in fact, I thought it was comical that Scarborough and Halperin behaved as though they were pulling a George Carlin with a modified seven dirty words routine. Was Halperin wrong to suggest that the President had a tantrum and was rude to his audience by blaming corporate jets, evil, job creators, and condescending to congress by comparing them to his children? No, he wasn’t. (Dude, it’s your party that still hasn’t produced a budget, your homework, in two years.) Halperin could have phrased it differently. This isn’t “The Young Turks” on Youtube, this is is a professional network on … MSNBC. Yeah, OK. It’s still network television, though.

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During a film montage tribute to late director Sidney Lumet, the obscenity “f**king” was broadcast on MSNBC. There have been no repercussions. This is in stark contrast to the immediate and indefinite suspension of MSNBC analyst Mark Halperin today after he said President Obama was “kind of a dick” at yesterday’s press conference at the White House.

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This is no way to talk about the President of the United States:

Mr. Halperin has been suspended indefinitely by MSNBC. Halperin is also a senior political analyst for TIME and co-authored the bestseller Game Change.

What, him worry? (more…)

In his latest Time.com piece, Mark Halperin, Editor At Large and Senior MSNBC Political Analyst, has decided that the GOP must not jump into the furor surrounding the latest slip of the First Tongue as it relates to the controversy around the proposed Ground Zero Mosque.

Halperin is quick to point out that the situation has obvious “political potency” but he advises the GOP to avoid using it.  This is like asking Alex Rodriguez to layoff a hanging curveball because it’s late in the game and the Yankees have a large lead. What’s next, a slaughter rule for the upcoming elections?  Will your follow-up story on Time.com ask for candidates with a commanding poll lead to limit spending or fund raising in order to allow their opponent to catch up or save them from public embarrassment?

The savvy analyst also states what everyone else already knows, the GOP stands to win back a number of seats in the mid-term elections without pointing out the obvious problems with the President’s Ramadan Dinner statement being used as additional fuel on the campaign fires.

Halperin goes on to claim: (more…)

In case you ever thought the media played things straight — you know, actually quoted people accurately and, when paraphrasing, gave a fair summation of what the person actually said and meant — think again.

Check out this priceless clip from the increasingly irrelevant Morning Joe MSNBC gabfest, which features a sputtering Chris Matthews summarizing some remarks from Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle, who’s running against Harry Reid in Nevada for the U.S. Senate.

Like a typical leftist, poor Chris has no sense of irony or metaphor or anything else — spooked by his own dark fantasies of the right, he takes every statement made by a conservative absolutely literally, then spins it into a terrifying tale of lurking militias and Christian-rightists and lions and tigers and bears oh my… (more…)

This piece, in the Times of London, is worth reading for many reasons, but most of all to show how far journalism — we used to call it “reporting” — has strayed from its mid-century ideal. To wit:

Nicholas Tomalin — the wonderful, bombastic Sunday Times writer who died in 1973 reporting from the Golan Heights — thought he knew the answer. In 1969, a happier time for the industry, he began a piece in this magazine by asserting: “The only qualities essential for real success in journalism are rat-like cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability.” But if Tomalin were commissioned now, he would strike out that famous gambit and start again.

Jon Meacham

Today, you’ll need luck, flair, an alternative source of income, endless patience, an optimistic disposition, sharp elbows and a place to stay in London. But the essential quality for success now is surely tenacity. Look around the thinning newsrooms of the national titles. Look at the number of applicants for journalism courses, at the queue of graduates — qualified in everything except the only thing that matters, experience — who are desperate for unpaid work on newspapers and magazines. Look at the 1,200 people who applied in September for one reporter’s position on the new Sunday Times website. You’d shoot a horse with those odds.

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Readers rarely get a chance to see the re-writing of history, but they’re seeing an attempt in the recent reporting by the Legacy Media of the John Edwards Scandal.

Several recently-published books (Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s Game Change and Edwards’ ex-aide, Andrew Young’s The Politician) examine the John Edwards scandal and Edwards’ elaborate cover-up of his affair and love child with campaign videographer, Rielle Hunter.

Halperin and Heilemann would have readers believe that they were on the trail of the story from the start–and perhaps they were.  It’s just that they didn’t bother to inform the readers of their employers, TIME and New York, while the scandal and cover-up were occurring.

Both books have prompted reports and discussions of the Edwards Scandal, particularly on ABC, which scored a series of exclusive interviews of Young, intent on publicizing his book.  The interviews along with other information is featured prominently on ABC’s website under John Edwards Scandal: (more…)

Should the National Enquirer get the Pulitzer Prize for its multi-year investigation of the John Edwards affair, scandal and cover-up? That’s a question that’s been asked lately: in some cases, at the same Mainstream Media papers which participated in the news blackout of the Enquirer’s Edwards’ coverage.

Edwards, who had been Sen. John Kerry’s running mate in 2004, was one of the front-runners at the time the Enquirer broke the second installment of the story on December 18, 2007.

The Enquirer released an abundance of easily-verifiable information at that time: Rielle Hunter, a former Edwards campaign worker, was pregnant with what the Enquirer reported was Edwards’ love child; she had been moved within five miles of the Edwards campaign headquarters in Chapel Hill, NC; Hunter was living an exclusive gated community, a few houses down the street from Edwards’ former Director of Finance, Andrew Young; and, she was driving around in a BMW registered to Young.  Add all this to the fact that information about Hunter had disappeared from the Internet and other publicly-searchable databases and the MSM was handed a great story. (more…)

For long-suffering conservatives, Christmas arrived about a month late this year.  But considering all the presents we got this week, it was like coming downstairs and finding the Budweiser Clydesdales under the tree, instead of that crummy used Radio Flyer your dad managed to find on eBay for twenty bucks.

First, on Tuesday, there was the Massachusetts Miracle, in which an obscure state senator named Scott Brown came out of nowhere — okay, Wrentham — to defeat a lackluster and morally dubious Democrat machine party hack who had expected to slow-walk herself, with David Gergen’s blessing, into “Teddy Kennedy’s seat.”  But the Bay State voters had other ideas for the “Massachusette” –

Brown ran hard on the selling point that he would be the 41st vote in the Senate against Harry Reid’s and Nancy Pelosi’s screwball tax-and-wreck “health care” plan, a Rube Goldbergian contraption that would have made Elbridge Gerry weep with envy at all its cut-outs, set-asides, bribes and special-interest stroking.  He also campaigned on the notion that taxpayer dollars would be better spent fighting terrorists instead of paying for lawyers for them.  So, naturally, the first questions he got yesterday from the press corps in Washington were all along the lines of: “You’re not really a Republican, are you?”

To which the Democrats, caught flat-footed as usual, basically reacted like this: (more…)

While the media is dragging out the insensitive, possibly racist comments of Harry Reid and Bill Clinton, let me throw a few hypotheticals out there because a journalistic ethical line may have been crossed, and was done so with biased intent by New York Magazine’s John Heilemann and Time magazine’s Mark Halperin.

A pre-arranged agreement probably took place here between the reporters and interviewees, but we all know what contracts and pre-nuptial agreements are worth nowadays.

Hypothetical #1
Harry Reid made his

“light-skinned”, “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”

comments during the 2008 presidential primaries.

Had the reporters (and I use that title intentionally) reported what they heard, that may or may not have had an effect on the outcome. Some voters might have been so disgusted with Reid, they may have taken it out on Obama’s opponents at the time, or stayed home altogether. (more…)

Why did Game Change authors, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann keep quiet on one of the 2008 campaign’s juiciest stories–only to spill the beans eighteen months later?

More importantly, why did they tell their readers about the John Edwards scandal only after it became personally profitable to do so?

Political reporters Halperin and Heilemann signed their book deal in June 2008, reportedly for a “mid- to high- six-figure sum.”co-authors of the ubiquitous political tell-all, Game Change.  Sprinkled amongst this cornucopia of unsourced gossip, rumor, whispers and innuendo are nuggets of hard news, particularly about former 2008 Democrat presidential candidate John Edwards.

Of particular interest was the following passage, from the excerpt published by Heilemann’s employer, New York :

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When the news broke yesterday that Sarah Palin had signed on as a Fox News contributor an awful shrinking feeling in the groin must have hit the execs at the network’s competitors. While the old media continues to try to paint her as a crazed redneck, the fact of her ascendancy as a serious power player is now an inescapable fact. Her autobiography, Going Rogue is a publishing phenomenon, having sold 2.7 million copies as of December 1 of 2009.  It’s one of  just four political memoirs to sell more than a million copies.

This from — as the left frames the narrative — a failed vice-presidential candidate who didn’t even finish her first term in office as governor of Alaska.  The old media and its enablers have tried in vain to discredit, demonize and disenfranchise the woman only to make her stronger. Yet still they hammer away at her relentlessly.

In the new book that has evey tongue in Washington wagging, Game Change, by political writers John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, it’s claimed that some McCain staffers who worked directly with Palin began to worry that she could be “mentally unstable.” This claim has been trumpeted by left-wing bloggers and the usual suspects in the press, desperate to keep up the Palin-bashing so they can ignore Obama’s increasingly evident failures. (more…)

The president of the United States is a “light-skinned” man “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”  That, at least, is the carefully considered opinion of soon-to-be-former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, quoted in a forthcoming book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, Game Change, about the 2008 election of Barack Obama.  The thing is, Hapless Harry meant it in a good way.

At least he did until now, when the news of the explosive statement found its way into The Washington Post and Politico.  Already reeling in his hopeless, doomed-as-Chris-Dodd campaign for re-election this fall, the Sage of Searchlight no doubt thought he was being complimentary in his usual clueless, white-guy-of-a-certain-age way.  After all, when Harry was growing up, “Negro” was the polite term you used to show you weren’t a racist, and as for light-skinned, well, we all knew what that meant.  Why, the next thing you know, Unhorsed Harry will be describing Obama as “a credit to his race.”

The authors write: “Reid was convinced, in fact, in fact,that Obama’s race would help him more than hurt him in a bid for the Democratic nomination.”  Gee, that sounds a lot like what Geraldine Ferraro said, and her reward was practically being drummed out of the Democrat Party.

This isn’t the first time the scrappy little Mormon boxer has found himself on his keister over race.  He had some ‘splainin’ to do when the seat-warming, monument-building senator from Illinois, Roland Burris, explicitly charged him with racism for trying to block indicted Gov. Rod Blagojevich from appointing an African-American to replace Obama in the senate.  Watch and listen to Harry dance as David Gregory grills him on Meet the Press:

But there’s bigger game afoot than one pathetic little man’s attempt to cling to his rapidly diminishing power.  With Dodd and Byron Dorgan having defenestrated themselves, Sens. Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin, two of the nastier people in the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body, are busily greasing the skids for obvious Democrat losers like Reid, Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu and other endangered-species types. (more…)