Pod Save America Centrist

Crooked Media is a podcast company founded by three former top Barack Obama staffers who don't hide their disdain for Donald Trump. Ray Tamarra/GC/Getty

. It's an insult conservatives adore, summoning with it the image of a bleeding heart so worried about giving offense, so tightly wound by the dictates of political correctness, so overwrought that the slightest provocation from a truth-teller with a concealed-carry permit will send the rattled lefty into full mental meltdown, cowering on the floor, sobbing through yoga breaths, begging Nancy Pelosi to make it all OK again.

May be bros, and they may be wonks, but they are definitely not snowflakes. They are furious and profane, frequently mocking and infrequently measured, closer in temperament to Rush Limbaugh than to

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Did not become the nation's most popular political podcast within the past few months because it offers insights impossible to find elsewhere in mainstream media outlets. What it promises instead is a no-bullshit conversation about politics conducted by former Barack Obama speechwriters Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett, as well as former presidential spokesman Tommy Vietor (former White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer co-hosts one of the week's two podcasts). Implicit in that promise is unapologetic bias in favor of the liberal humanism now buried deep beneath the rubble of Hillary Clinton's blue firewall. And while all three hosts clearly long for the civility of the Obama administration, they have no qualms about jettisoning civility for the sake of defeating Donald Trump's retrograde agenda.

CNN or NPR might gently suggest that it was unwise for former Trump transition-team member and current House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, a Republican representative of California, to personally relay classified intelligence to Trump—and to announce to the media that he had such information and had given it to the president; Pfeiffer, conversely, calls Nunes a moron.

You can never underestimate how stupid Republican politicians are, declared Favreau in the midst of an extended evisceration of the GOP's rushed attempt to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

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Lovett proceeded to tear into Ryancare/Trumpcare, calling it a bastardized, shitty version of Obamacare and then offering a nuanced explanation of why it would be especially harmful to low-income seniors.

Editor Rich Lowry a few days before: We've been dreaming of this since you and I were drinking out of a keg.

Each week, but conservatives should listen as well. Since the election, they've repeatedly told themselves that the anti-Trump protests taking place around the nation are the work of professional agitators funded by liberal billionaires like George Soros.

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Is proof that the rage and dismay of coast elites are just as real and raw as the rage of the white working class, that the good folks of West Hollywood care as much about the future of the republic as the good folks of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.

Beams out its dissenting voices from a charmless, gray-walled studio in central Los Angeles. Nearby are the pungent La Brea Tar Pits, a prehistoric relative of the D.C. swamp the three hosts recently left behind.

Favreau, Lovett and Vietor, all in their mid-30s, logged a collective 11 years in the White House, while also working on various Obama campaigns. Still, each looks like he is carded every time he buys a six-pack. Their conversation is rapid-fire, hyper-allusive and filthy as hell, pleasantly reminiscent of the

Pod Save America

, only without Aaron Sorkin's fantasy of the hyper-articulate liberal able to quote from Jimmy Carter's inaugural address and 18th-century Mongolian romantic poetry while racing to an Oval Office confab on federal defense appropriations. To the contrary, the three men who've tasked themselves with saving the nation from Trump consistently forget, stumble and bicker. They obsess over their iTunes standing, taunting Michael Barbaro of

Podcast. Their former boss was the cerebral law professor; they are the star students who know exactly how much they can get away with.

They have positioned themselves as the voices of the resistance, says David Axelrod, close political adviser to President Obama and host of

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. Axelrod was speaking from his office at the University of Chicago, a framed photograph of the White House speechwriting team behind him. Axelrod's lone advice—not only for Crooked Media but for anyone involved in political commentary today—is to retain some measure of perspective. It's easy to get consumed by the moment.

That's especially true when every day is a vertiginous mix of the outrageous, the unbelievable and the confounding, delivered via early-morning tweets, surreal press briefings and leaked intelligence memoranda. As Lovett pointed out during one episode early in the Trump presidency, it is possible to burn through the fog manufactured by the president and his enablers, but it is exhausting. A refutation of every deception spouted by White House press secretary Sean Spicer or presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway, not to mention Trump himself, would make for a very tedious podcast, and a very long one.

Taping in late March that I understood how little political analysis had to do with the show's success. Most of us have had our fill of political analysis by the morning's second cup of coffee, and although Favreau and Lovett are domestic policy savants, and Vietor has an expert knowledge of foreign affairs from his time as the National Security Council's spokesman, you don't listen to

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Because its hosts are uniquely capable of taking apart Ryan's health care proposal or gaming out the potential outcomes of a looming confrontation with North Korea.

They will do that, sure, but they will also do something far more rare, which is to make politics entertaining and even fun, without ever downplaying what they see as the threat posed to American democracy by the man elected to defend it.

In Los Angeles, Capitol Hill was in the midst of a hearing on Russia's meddling in the presidential election that seemed equal parts

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. Later that day, Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch was due for his first round of congressional questioning. Trump had already unleashed a tweetstorm.

Favreau, who became Obama's chief speechwriter when he was 26, is the podcast's de facto lead host. Clad in one of those thin-weave, comfortable-looking hoodies that only the fit and the young can wear, he began the episode by noting that Trump's more recent tweets lacked their usual spark of conspiratorial creativity. It feels like really recycled material, he said. Lovett suggested Trump was already bored out of his mind by the presidency. They seemed almost disappointed.

View this post on Instagram Have you heard?! Jon Lovett —STRAIGHT SHOOTER RESPECTED ON ALL SIDES — is hosting a brand new show on Crooked Media! Lovett or Leave It is a week in review recorded in front of a live audience every Friday. It’s great. A post shared by Crooked Media (@thecrookedmedia) on Mar 21, 2017 at 5:24pm PDT

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A good deal of time was spent recording ads for sponsors such as Parachute sheets and Motif, an investment company. Usually, these ads include broadsides against Spicer or diminutive Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whose lack of courage in standing up to Trump is a favorite podcast topic. Today, an ad for MVMT watches led to a dig against FBI Director James Comey, while Lovett interrupted an ad for Sonos speakers to reveal that he calls his bathroom the boom-boom room.

But funny goes only so far. If you sought only laughter, you'd be fully sated with a weekly serving of Samantha Bee or

Goes through more tonal registers than a Philip Glass opera. This kind of freewheeling style can be frustrating for someone who simply wants a low-temperature discussion of Trump's proposed $1 trillion infrastructure plan, but it can also be refreshing for someone who wants his or her own fury and dismay matched. Political analysts take themselves too seriously, Favreau told me. At least they do when they're talking about politics. Many of these people, in real life, are quite entertaining and fun to hang out with. The irony is that the primary reason

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Exists is because its hosts believe Trump needs to be taken very seriously. The trick is to take him seriously but not so seriously that you'll want to jump in front of a moving train.

They've tapped into such a powerful, hungry, searching audience, says Nick Quah, founder of Hot Pod, a trade newsletter about the podcast industry. I mean, shit's terrifying right now for lots of people.

The podcast is obviously disposed against the new president in particular and conservatism in general, but Favreau argued that being accused of bias is not the worst thing. Mainstream media outlets have been charged with liberal bias for years, sometimes with good cause, but frequently for simply reporting facts Fox News finds vexsome. Because it makes no pretense of fairness, because it has no investors or managing editors to answer to,

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Is a remarkably honest accounting of the liberal psyche in 2017. I don't imagine that most hardcore conservatives would enjoy listening to the show, but I'm certain they'd learn that the Democrat is a far more complex creature than Sean Hannity has been telling them.

There is so much bullshit and kabuki theater in punditry, says Cody Keenan,

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