Forget Pod Save America.
Hands down the best political podcast on now is The Professional Left with Driftglass and Bluegal.
If you like Charlie Pierce, you’ll love Driftglass and the Professional Left, because Charlie Pierce loves them!
And this week is an ideal week to get acquainted with them because it’s their 9th anniversary!
If you haven’t been listening, you’ve been missing:
- Coinage of memorable phrases like:
- “Dumpster Fire” (Bush, Trump, Republicans and the courtier media) (now in widespread use)
- “The Last Confederate Monument” (The Wall)
- Reprogrammable Meatbags (alt. Meatsacks) (the Republican base)
- A Cyborg sent from the future to destroy American (Hugh Hewitt)
- Relentless skewering of the rancid high priests of the mainstream media, from Matthew Dowd (“I’m proud not to have voted for either candidate in 2016); to Chuck Todd (“If we said they’re liars they wouldn’t come back”) to Jeff Greenfield (“Forget Ben Sasse’s votes and policies, he’s dreamy because he reads books!”)
- Exegesis by Driftglass, the World’s Most Eminent Brookslogist,* of the biweekly follies of the unaccountably omnipresent and grotesquely overpraised pundit who reaps big bucks slinging the same both-siderist whitewashing of his own sordid past on valuable NY Times acreage.
- Dispatches from the “Cornfield Resistance,” by the family who actually lives on a cornfield outside of Springfield IL, right in the middle of red Southern IL.
- Prescient early criticism of Russo-phile, Demo-phobe Glenn Greenwald, despite an onslaught of brickbats from his hordes.
Their blog/pod lineage is impeccable: Driftglass going back to the Cro-blognan days of 2003-2004. He was a disciple of the late, brilliant Steve Gilliard, one of the original Kos front-pagers, promoted out of the comments by Markos in the early days. Driftglass branched out from the comment section of Steve’s “News Blog” to found his own “pseud-eponymous” blog. Blue Gal is also a long-time, great blogger — a brilliant writer now at Crooks and Liars.
Driftglass and Bluegal celebrate a lot of anniversaries, and they’re all special: Annual anniversaries of the show like this one; Every hundred show anniversaries; and wedding anniversaries — DG and BG met through blogs and meet-ups and are a model of what a media political couple should be — the anti-Carville-Matalin or Conway-Conway.
The 900th is great to begin with because it runs through highlights of the nine years — showing how consistently right they (and we) have been, through the ACA wars, the Obama election, narrating the 2016 disaster as it was happening and lifting us up for the last two years ascent from disaster.
Here are my prior Pro Left Diaries:
The Professional Left: Outrage, Humor and Love in a Must-Listen Podcast
Can you be angry, funny AND adorable at the same time? Yes, if you're the Professional Left Podcast
So go listen, and/or donate
It’s not just a hobby, it’s their job.
* along with the erudite Yastreblyansky