They told me that if I voted for John McCain reporters on Morning Joe would be calling the POTUS a dick on national TV...

…and they were right:

with apolo­gies to Glenn Reynolds who invented the meme

Update: Added the link to the entire “if I voted for John McCain” col­lec­tion

Update 2: Take a look at the video and make note of this. He didn’t say it off the air and didn’t mean to say it off the air. He meant to say it on the air and be seen say­ing it! That speaks volumes

Update 3: They told me if I used the “If I voted for John McCain” meme con­cern­ing this Morn­ing Joe busi­ness I would be able to snarf an insta­lanche and they were right!

Update 4: They told me if I voted for John McCain reporters who dared insult the pres­i­dent would be sus­pended and they were right

“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,” said the net­work in a statement.

Ed Mor­ris­sey com­ments before the news of the sus­pen­sion news came out

the fuss seems a lit­tle overblown. “Dick” isn’t a word that needs to be cen­sored; for one thing, it’s a proper name used by a num­ber of politi­cians, includ­ing Dick Durbin, who’s sec­ond in Demo­c­ra­tic lead­er­ship in the Sen­ate. It’s also a play­ground word for “jerk” or “penis,” but hardly an obscen­ity. Either way, the pro­ducer shouldn’t be blamed for miss­ing the delay button.

Halperin should be apol­o­giz­ing for a lack of imag­i­na­tion. He’s right in that the Pres­i­dent acted like a pout­ing, sullen ado­les­cent dur­ing the press conference

Hey insult­ing the pres­i­dent on MSNBC is VER­BOTEN even if almost nobody watches it.

Update 5: Just saw the Halperin sus­pen­sion reported on CNN (11:54 a.m. EST), they said it was a “word begin­ning with D”. Can some­body tell me how many peo­ple at CNN or MSNBC were sus­pended for call­ing Tea Party mem­bers “Teabaggers”?

Update 6: Stacy McCain notices that the left has decided it’s proof of con­ser­v­a­tive media bias:

Benen expects Democ­rats to employ class-​warfare rhetoric, and expects lib­eral jour­nal­ists to praise Democ­rats who do so. And while Halperin is a lib­eral in good stand­ing, his accu­rate assess­ment of Obama’s press-​conference per­for­mance — which was off-​putting, in that the pres­i­dent seemed peev­ish and petu­lant — per­mits the Left to renew their bizarre claim that the media has a right-​wing bias.

Of course why didn’t we think of that before!

Update 7: How crazy is this pun­ish­ment? So crazy that even Greg Sar­gent gets it

Of course what Halperin said is inap­pro­pri­ate. Of course it’s inevitable that MSNBC had to mete out some kind of pun­ish­ment. But it could have been a three-​day sus­pen­sion or on-​air rebuke or some­thing. To be clear, I don’t really care about Halperin’s fate. The point is that an indef­i­nite sus­pen­sion obscures the fact that crass and dumb and “uncivil” state­ments aren’t the real prob­lem here.

Most of his piece if non­sense but he is right that the pun­ish­ment of Halperin is excessive.