The only podcast combining politics, humor, outrage, kittens, science fiction and marital bliss is The Professional Left with the husband-wife team of Driftgass and Blue Gal. A new edition comes out every Friday (including Christmas and New Year’s!) and I never miss it, usually listening on bike rides around the park.
They just won a coveted Swifty for Episode 295 (July 31, 2015): "Is Cecil the Lion a Proxy War?"
If you’re not listening, you’re missing:
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A wonderful team: who dissect, and yes, eviscerate, the prior week’s inevitable cavalcade of spurious conventional wisdom and false equivalence, including Driftglass’s brilliant rants about pernicious “both-siderism.”
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Bible Bitch: A semi-regular feature by Blue Gal using passages from the Good Book to expose its grotesque misuse by the “religious” right. This Jewish listener loves “Bible Bitch” and its soon to be viral catch-phrase, “That’s not scriptural.”
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Quotable “Internet Kitties”: Their pictures are sent in by listeners, but Driftglass and Blue Gal pass along the felines’ wise political observations with their answer to the question, “How are the Internet Kitties Doing this Week?” On Nov. 6, the answer was: “The Internet Kitties are glad to hear that the Pataki and Jindal campaigns have been sent to a farm upstate where they can run for President all day long.”
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Brooks Bashing: As a fellow Brooksologist (see, e.g., my Krugman: Simpson, Bowles and Brooks: Ridiculous and Mind-Boggling) I appreciate the Professional Left’s regular exposure of David Brooks, the most notorious “wolf in sheep’s clothing” working in media today. I never tire of Driftglass’s reminding us how Brooks “evolved” from rabid “Weekly Standard” impeachment-hound in the ‘90s; to early 2000’s W-worship and war cheerleading; to his present perch atop the false equivalence dung-heap.
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Other Pundit Bashing: If like me you’re fed up with Chuck Todd, Morning Joe, David Frum, et al., the Professional Left relentlessly shows the phony both-siderism, cowardice and dereliction of duty by the “liberal media,” including the ruins of what used to be (but never was) the left’s Fox News, MSNBC. Luke Russert? Really?
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Science Fiction University: Each PL episode includes a sci-fi lesson in the form of a quiz for Driftglass, revealing his encyclopedic knowledge of obscure and well-known aliens, monsters, space-craft, pod-people and radiation mutants. (The clever quizzes are usually provided by a man with the world’s most self-deprecating pseudonym, “Dog-faced Herman.”)
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Love in Bloom: Our faith in the institution of marriage is reinforced each week by the PL couple’s exchange of “I love you”s at the end of each episode. Not that it hasn’t been clear in their interaction during the whole podcast.
You owe it to yourself to listen, and if you can afford it, contribute directly or through their Amazon Link.
