White House spokesman Jay Carney may have played a direct role in MSNBC’s decision to sack — er, suspend indefinitely — Time magazine’s Mark Halperin for calling President Obama a “dick” on Morning Joe.
Carney said he personally told MSNBC that he didn’t appreciate Time magazine’s Mark Halperin’s obscene name-calling.
“The coment that was made was inappropriate,” Carney told reporters at a briefing Thursday. “It would be inappropriate to say that about any president from either party. On behalf of the White House, I expressed that sentiment to the network.”
Carney did not say whether he called NBC to complain or they called him, and he had no comment on MSNBC’s decision to suspend Halperin from his role as an analyst.
In announcing its decision to suspend Halperin, MSNBC issued a statement calling the “dick” comment “completely inappropriate and unacceptable” and apologizing to the President, the White House and all of the cable network’s viewers.
Halperin said the President was acting like a “kind a dick” in his Wednesday press conference when he scolded Congressional leaders for not taking the Aug. 2 debt-ceiling deadline seriously.
The Washington Post’s Plum Line blogger Greg Sargent talked to ex-senior White House political adviser David Axelrod who condemned the remark, but also said it was a “mistake” that shouldn’t be seen as representative of Halperin’s career.
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