You are listening to another no fair remembering stuff, the Tuesday edition of the Professional Left Podcast, and available wherever you get your podcasts, and at our website, pro-leftpod.com, where you can also contribute to this podcast.

There's a Patreon button at our website, or you can mail us a letter and or contribution at the Professional Left podcast, P.O. Box 9133, Springfield, Illinois, 62791.

And it's not safe for work is a blogger tradition.

Hey, in our last episode, we left off with a quote from Digby from 20 years ago, calling out Peggy Noonan for her blatant hypocrisy.

We also noted that 20 years later, Noonan has only gotten worse, still has her job for life at the Wall Street Journal, and is still treated with reverence by her equally awful peers.

And Digby is still blogging.

Yes, she is.

But getting back to awful people, pretty much all the Bush era malefactors and enablers in the media,

who should never have survived the collapse of the Bush administration,

are still employed and still being credited as the very serious opinion havers all these years later.

And that is a problem.

Yeah, you can see them every day on MSNBC if you really want to.

But we're talking about the past. And since the rise of the Rush Limbaugh-style conservative media in the late 80s and the early 90s and the corresponding rise of Gingrich-style politics during that same period,

conservatives have relied on a kind of pincer movement to gain and hold power.

The Limbaugh right works the political sewers and keeps the party base

in a constant paranoid rage over the imaginary crimes of the dirty commie left like us.

And every two years, those votes are harvested by professional Republican mercenaries

like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove and Matthew Dowd, now of MSNBC, and Rick Wilson, now of MSNBC.

Meanwhile, the job of the respectable right, and those are hacks like Peggy Newton, who were a constant

presence on the Sunday shows or on MSNBC or in the New York Times and the Washington Post and the weekly standard crowd,

people like David Brooks and Bill Crystal, their job was to convince the people who watch

the Sunday shows or read the New York Times that the Limba right either didn't really exist

...