One of the lesser-known services we provide here at the shebeen consists of our workshops for young pundits. In these gatherings, we try to prepare the next generation of cable-news superstars and Green Room candy-gobblers. The workshops are based on a list of simple rules that the staff has developed from long experience. For example, here is one of the rules:

Rule No. 191: If you value your reputation as a serious analyst, do not appear on the radio for five years with anyone named Bubba The Love Sponge. CNN brings us the latest validation of this easy-to-follow rule.

The radio segments are from 2006 to 2011. In one of the clips, Carlson said of Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, "I feel sorry for unattractive women. I mean, it's nothing they did, you know. Nobody deserves that. And men are just mean." He spoke about a colleague at the time, MSNBC's Contessa Brewer, as "saucy and cute." He described Hillary Clinton as "anti-penis" and said "you look at Hillary and you know in your heart that if she could castrate you, she would."

Naturally, Carlson is unrepentant.

“Media Matters caught me saying something naughty on a radio show more than a decade ago...“Rather than express the usual ritual contrition, how about this: I’m on television every weeknight live for an hour. If you want to know what I think, you can watch. Anyone who disagrees with my views is welcome to come on and explain why.”

Spoken like Bubba The Love Sponge.

That's the thing about this story. I'm not going to stand on one leg waiting for the Fox News Channel to do anything about this except issue disingenuous press releases. But the episode does illustrate one of the conspicuous suspension vehicles within which the prion disease was injected into the Republican Party and the conservative movement that was the energy behind it. When the radio airwaves were deregulated, and the Fairness Doctrine was chloroformed, the conservatives smartly glommed onto it like the last train to glory. The national success of the likes of Rush Limbaugh begat thousands of local Limbaughs until wingnut radio became like that 900,000-pound fungus in Michigan.

(Of course, as the economic policies for which these guys shilled really took hold in the radio industry, media consolidation favored the syndicated programming and a lot of the local Limbaughs lost their gigs. Pity.)

Sirius Satellite radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge starts the game between the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Philadelphia Flyers by saying on December 23, 2009 in Tampa, Florida. Scott Audette Getty Images

Ultimately, as the prion disease grew more virulent, and as conservatism intensified its mock romance with the dissatisfied members of the white working-class, the simultaneous effort to slow-dance with those folks while supporting politics and policies that further immiserated them grew more frantic. (And the country elected Barack Obama twice, which occasioned more visceral panic in the primary audiences.) The intensity on the radio rose in direct proportion to a rapid decline in intellectual content.

So, by 2006, when the Avignon Presidency was cratering in, conservatives needed Bubba The Love Sponge to maintain their fraudulent proletarian street cred. The depressing part is not what Tucker Carlson said to Bubba The Love Sponge. The depressing part is that so many people were listening.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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