While bemoaning during Friday’s Deadline: White House about the lack of decency and civility in light of White House staffer Kelly Sadler’s ugly comment about Republican Senator John McCain (AZ), MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace joked to White House correspondent Kristen Welker about choking White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

If that wasn’t enough, MSNBC contributor John Heilemann hailed White House reporters for doing “valiant work” in press briefings exposing the White House’s lies and Wallace’s fellow McCain/Palin campaign aide Steve Schmidt ruled that Sanders is worse than Baghdad Bob.

Going to Welker on the topic of Sanders ducking questions about Sadler suggesting McCain’s take on Gina Haspel’s CIA nomination didn’t matter because he’s “dying anyway,” Wallace quipped: “Kristen Welker, how do you resist the temptation to run up and wring her neck? Why can't she just say if a staffer said that, we're going to get to the bottom of it and she'll be fired?”

After the show, Wallace apologized in a tweet:

Welker didn’t address Wallace’s jest, but instead explaining how reporters expected Sanders to say something about Sadler during the briefing only for that to have never happened.

“But, Nicolle, as you've been discussing, it does shine a light on the tone and culture within this White House, within Washington right now and within our politics more broadly I think, Nicolle,” Welker later added.

After Wallace laughed at First Lady Melania Trump’s “Be Best” initiative as “a joke” considering comments like Sadler’s, the former Bush White House aide admitted that she can’t tell “the difference any more between Baghdad Bob and Sarah Sanders.”

Like a good liberal reporter, Heilemann decided to throw a pity party for the media (click “expand” to read more):

HEILEMANN: Nor do I. I don't know the difference and I think the motivation -- I don't want to try to — I would never want to in any way disparage our colleagues who have to live through that horror show every day. WALLACE: Well, Kristen had the most questions today. I mean, Kristen made the toughest run at Sarah on these questions. HEILEMANN: And they do — they do valiant work every day trying to get some — some semblance of truth or to at least expose the hypocrisy and the lies, the Baghdad Bob-ness of it from the podium. But if you're asking me how they tolerate it, how they live with it, like, why? They have more fortitude than I have. I could not go down there and do what Kristen Welker — I could not. I would slit my throat after about maybe two of those briefings if I had to sit in that room every day.

Schmidt finally spoke again after an uninterrupted, four-minute-and-31-second tirade earlier in the show about Sadler’s smear of McCain, so he used the chance to show how little he himself cares about civility (for a few past examples, see here, here, here, here, and here).

“[I]f Baghdad Bob didn't say what Saddam Hussein wanted him to say, Baghdad Bob would be shot. Sarah Sanders is lying of her own volition. She stands up there every day as a willful participant. Baghdad Bob was a hostage. Sarah Sanders is an accomplice, as is the entirety of the political operation of the White House,” opined Schmidt.

(h/t: Washington Examiner’s Eddie Scarry)

To see the full transcript from MSNBC’s Deadline: White House on May 11, click “expand.”