Politico Suspends Reporter for Racial Anti-Romney Remarks

And Politico reports the suspension.

POLITICO reporter Joe Williams has been suspended pending review of recent controversial comments he made on television and Twitter, POLITICO editors informed staff late Thursday night.

On MSNBC today, Williams made a remark suggesting Mitt Romney was only comfortable around white people. The video was first flagged by conservative website Washington Free Beacon. Breitbart.com ran the video and also flagged a series of tweets Williams had written that made fun of the Republican candidate, particularly in regard to his wealth.

“Regrettably, an unacceptable number of Joe Williams’s public statements on cable and Twitter have called into question his commitment to this responsibility,” POLITICO’s founding editors John Harris and Jim VandeHei wrote in a memo to the staff. “His comment about Governor Romney earlier today on MSNBC fell short of our standards for fairness and judgment in an especially unfortunate way.”

More at the link. Here are Joe Williams’ racist comments, which aired on MSNBC.

Politico has handled this matter quickly and should be commended, which is more than can be said for MSNBC, the network that drove the discussion and aired the comments. This week, MSNBC editors deliberately twisted a Romney comment in an attempt to paint him in an unflattering light. When bloggers brought the matter to light, the network piled a blatant lie on top of the dishonest editing, claiming that they did not have the chance to air the full comment. They are a 24-hour cable news channel. They had time, but chose to air an edited version of the comment to make Romney look bad.

No one at MSNBC has been reprimanded or suspended for the deliberate dishonest edit, which aired on Andrea Mitchell’s daily program. She has not been suspended or reprimanded. MSNBC has swept the matter under the rug. MSNBC has not taken action against host Martin Bashir or David Corn, both of whom gleefully painted Romney as a racist in the clip above.

The rot at MSNBC is evidently systemic and beyond remedy.

More: Williams, who is Politico’s White House correspondent, also tweeted an obscene joke about Ann Romney.