In Defense of Mark Halperin (Sort Of)

[Casino67]

TheWeeklyStandard:

So Mark Halperin went on MSNBC's Morning Joe this morning and said the President was acting like a [coarse euphemism for male genitalia] and an uproar has ensued. I don't applaud (?) Halperin's decision to express himself so vulgarly and he shouldn't have described the president this way.

However, the faux-liberal outrage over the lack of civility here is just ludicrous. And the harumphing about bias here is even worse. Here's the Washington Monthly's Steve Benen:

Forget the trees; look at the forest: congressional Republicans, for the first time in American history, are holding the debt ceiling hostage. They’ve announced to the country and the world that they’ll cause an economic crash, on purpose, unless Democrats agree to dramatic spending cuts. Yesterday, President Obama held a press conference to urge GOP leaders to accept a compromise — he and other Democrats will accept massive cuts, but the president wants Republicans to agree to some concessions as part of a bipartisan agreement.

I couldn’t care less which four-letter word Halperin uses. I do care that Halperin is presented to news consumers as a neutral observer when he clearly is not.

That forest-for-the-trees argument strikes me as pretty disingenuous. Remember that six months ago Democrats were in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. If raising revenue was so darn important, they could have voted to raise taxes and they didn't. Republicans, by contrast, campaigned heavily on not raising taxes last year and voters gave the party the biggest electoral victory since in over 60 years. Democrats had a catostrophic failure of leadership, and Republicans are holding fast to the promises they made to the electorate.