if you have something to say, best say it out loud. . . I guess

John Green, executive producer of ABC’s weekend Good Morning America, was suspended for a month without pay after two private e-mails were made public.

In one, a blackberry missive leaked to the Drudge Report, Green thumbed during the first Bush/Kerry debate in 2004, "Are you watching this? Bush makes me sick. If he uses the 'mixed messages' line one more time, I'm going to puke."

In the other, which appeared Thursday in the New York Post, Green complained that he didn’t want to book former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright because she had “Jew shame.” (Even taking into account Albright’s revealed history, I still gotta say, “huh?”)

Well, on its face, the second seems worse than the first, but in both cases, these were private communications. Has no one else at ABC News, or at any other news outfit, for that matter, ever issued a snarky aside on current events?

Even more perplexing, though, is that Green was punished for expressing an opinion in private, whereas the likes of Terry Moran and Brian Ross (more here) are allowed to mimic RNC talking points on an almost daily basis, in public, during ABC’s “fair and balanced and down the middle“ news programming, as ABC spokesman Jeffrey Schneider put it.

OK, it’s not that perplexing. Wrong, but not perplexing.