Even if you don't like Barack Obama, or see nothing wrong with using quasi-vulgarities to attack him, it's not hard to see why Time's Mark Halperin was suspended by MSNBC for calling the president a "dick" on national television. In the modern era, at least, political commentators have generally refrained from using higher than PG-13 language to describe our politicians, even when they deserve it. Regardless of whether Obama is actually a dick (and as an ambitious, national-level politician, I'd be shocked if he wasn't), Halperin violated the current norms of political discourse and was sanctioned accordingly.
Halperin's dirty words aren't the story here. Insofar that there's anything significant about this incident, it's the extent to which he has destroyed his facade of even-handedness. As a political prognosticator, Halperin isn't very valuable; by and large, he trades in warmed over Beltway pablum. His worth, if anything, is as an ostensibly neutral observer of political events. When Mark Halperin complains that President Obama is criticizing Paul Ryan without offering "a bold, paradigm-shifting budget proposal," readers are supposed to take that as gospel, or close to it. Of course, it doesn't take a close reading of Halperin's work to see that he is a conservative hack. In early 2009, when congressional Republicans refused to support an economic stimulus package that contained their ideas (i.e. tax cuts), Halperin blamed their opposition on Obama's supposed partisanship:
"[Obama] could have gone for centrist compromises. You can say to your own party, 'Sorry, some of you liberals aren't going to like it, but I am going to change this legislation radically to get a big centrist majority rather than an all-Democratic vote.' He chose not to do that, that's the exact path that George Bush took for most of his presidency with disastrous consequences for bipartisanship and solving big problems."
Given his history, and his affinity for right-wing provocateur Matt Drudge, it simply doesn't come as a shock to learn Halperin would attack a Democratic president for standing up to Republican demands.
