ON THE RIGHT, IT'S ALWAYS THE PAST

Maureen Dowd reminisces about her introduction to George H.W. Bush thirty years ago:

My mom had applied for a job as a reporter at The Washington Post in 1926 and had been told by a gruff city editor that it was too rough a trade for a young lady.

But by 1988, I could be The New York Times White House reporter.

And that was a shock to the system for H.W. He was all noblesse oblige and I was all class rage. He was clearly expecting someone with a name like Horatio Farnsworth III, a Harvard man who would bat around the finer points of the North Atlantic alliance over highballs on Air Force One. And he got a newfangled, irreverent "reporterette," as Rush Limbaugh called us in those days, who was just as focused on character and personality as politics and policy.

I don't want to talk about Dowd and Bush. Instead, I'd like to point out that Limbaugh did not refer to female reporters as "reporterettes" only "in those days." He did so as recently as six weeks ago, in reference to CNN's Laura Jarrett:

They did everything they could to make Russian collusion and “Trump did it” the issue for 2-1/2 years. Here we are and the midterms are a little over two weeks away, not a word about it, other than this Mueller report supposedly being out there. But now, Valerie Jarrett’s daughter, who is a reporterette at CNN... No bias there. Valerie Jarrett’s daughter, says, “Calm down. The Mueller investigation is not over. It’s going to be going on long after the midterms.”

Time passes and society changes -- but not on the right. On the right, it's always the past. Specifically, it always one idealized moment just before "they" took all the fun out of everything by mandating "political correctness."

I don't know how much longer the 67-year-old Limbaugh will continue to broadcast, but if he's on the air thirty years from now, as a 97-year-old, I'm sure he'll still be calling female journalists "reporterettes," just to piss us off.