You are listening to another no fair remembering stuff, the Tuesday edition of the Professional

Left Podcast, at available wherever you get your podcasts, and at our website, proleftpod.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, PioBox 911,

Springfield, Illinois, 62791.

And it's not safe for work. Today we're going to look all the way back to the year 2012.

No, that's Rush 2112 with Neil Pert on drums. An album I ran out and bought in late

1976 or maybe early 1977 at the long since gone and forgotten Park Forest record store

with money I'd save mowing lawns. Little did I realize. Way back then, tromping through the snow, innocent young man that I was, to the store to buy my very

own copy of 2112, that A, I would later come to realize with dawning horror what it meant

that Rush dedicated the album to, quote, the genius of Iron Rand, unquote.

B, 30 years later, I would get to vote for the first

black president candidate on a major party ticket, very exciting. C, he would have a really weird name.

D, I would actually have met and helped vet him for his failed run for Congress just a few years

earlier. And E, he would win in 2008. And F, by 2012,

the Punditocracy was sure he was doomed. Doomed.

2012 was the year Barack Obama was definitely going to lose. And President Mitt Romney was

inevitable. Maybe at the end of this episode we should take a

moment to pause and compare and contrast the pundit hysterics of 2012 who were sure that Obama was

doomed and the calm assurance of those same pundits in 2016 that the nomination and election of Donald Trump was

impossible.

Unpossible.

...