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finest four hours of conservative talk in the country. And many days, we did.
    The day after the Summers shocker, Alex was her usual, stoic, competent self. Her mannerisms, as usual, gave no hint as to what she was really thinking, although she may have been sporting more black in her attire than usual, I couldn’t tell for sure.
    And good old WRGT never missed an opportunity to turn news into a promotional/sales event, so programming immediately created a new station jingle that was put in rotation every hour. Set to a fife-and-drum music bed, it said:
    â€œWRGT, where freedom-loving Americans assemble and lay claim to the rights that make America great. We’re already praying for our next president!”
    It was over the top. I mean, you’d think they could spare a few prayers for our current president given the state of the country. But the listeners were loving the tumult and you’d think they had wintered at Valley Forge instead of on the Gulf of Mexico. Don Fortini, our head of sales, always anxious to turn a national crisis into coin, quickly expanded the ad campaign to include a list of sponsors who were willing to pay just to be tied to Summers’ downfall.
    â€œWRGT, where freedom loving Americans assemble and lay claim to the rights that make America great. Among those already praying for our next president are Fred Pork’s family of auto dealerships, Dr. Horace Furston, the man you call when it doesn’t last four hours, The Survivalist Shops, and Gary’s Gold Emporium.”
    The one person who wasn’t caught up in the euphoria was Phil, who called me the minute I signed off the air the morning after the announcement. He’d been on the phone nonstop with his talk radio host clients across the country and by the time he got to me, he was spitting blood.
    â€œThis is really bad, Stan. We just killed the golden goose.”
    â€œHuh?”
    â€œAll you guys have been getting a free ride. Summers was a gift from the talk radio gods, better even than Clinton after his blow job or Obama post-healthcare, but it went too far. I had a feeling he’d bit off more than he could chew with the spending requests, but I never figured he’d pull a Palin on us.”
    Through what was left of my kamikaze haze, I reminded Phil that Sarah Palin had quit halfway into her term whereas Summers was saying he would fulfill his, just not run for another so he could focus on the economy instead of campaigning.
    â€œToday’s not a day for your persnickety bullshit, Powers. Better you instead spend your time putting on your game face. Our whole business is in fuckin’ free fall.”
    In the world of talk radio, Phil was worried that this was the day the music—well, talk—died. So much of the nation’s talk material, my material, was based on kicking the crap out of Summers’ presidency. He wasn’t sure there’d ever be another Summers. He also predicted trouble for cable TV.
    â€œFox is fucked,” he railed into his phone. “No amount of leg shots of those lipsticked blond bimbos can make up for what they had going with Summers. And those commie bastards at MSNBC aren’t much better. Time for them to find a new butt boy.”
    I took that as pretty much an admission from Phil that the whole media world had become a circus, even though he’d never admit it. For some time now, the media outlets on the left—having seen the big business generated by conservative perspectives on the right—had been employing a similar model. I could almost stake my career on the fact that there was some lefty Phil clone who had whispered in Keith Olbermann’s ear when he was kicking the shit out of George W. Bush with all of his “special comments” in the last few years of W’s term. Hey, the guy might have fucked up by taking us into Iraq, but since when do we say that a president should be prosecuted as a war criminal? In the