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, prolefpod.com,

where you can also contribute to this podcast. There is a Patreon button at our website,

or you can mail us a letter and or contribution at the Professional Left podcast, P.O. Box 911,

Springfield, Illinois, 62791.

And it's not safe for work. And Blue Gail, you know that dream where you're suddenly pantsless in front of a big audience?

Or, you know, you had some assignment due and it isn't done,

or, you know, you're called on to give a really important speech, but you have no idea what the hell to say.

Well, guess what happened to the Washington Press Corps in January 2005?

They lived out that dream.

Thanks in no small part to a servile mainstream media,

George W. Bush had won re-election in November of 2004,

despite mounting evidence that his administration had lied us into war in Iraq

and that the war was a disaster. But with the exception of the McClatchy News Service,

the media was terrified of being labeled as liberal and unpatriotic by Fox News, which was now

virtually the Bush administration's state TV. So any story that painted the Bush White House in a bad light was downplayed

or ignored, which is how the Daily Show, a Comedy Central program with John Stewart, became, for all

intents and purposes, just about the only source of honest liberal reporting anywhere on television.

They talked the way liberal bloggers talked about the Bush administration, the Republican

Party, Fox News, and the Iraq War.

Just six days after Bush's second inaugural, when a White House reporter from an obscure outfit

called Tallinn News asked the following question

...