"An Evening Jon Elliott, The Most Dangerous Liberal in America"
by John A. Rippo
The booth is as quiet as a church during Mardi Gras as Air America radio personality Jon Elliott warms up for his nightly show. The engineer performs sound checks, adjusts his production board, crisply attends to every detail and makes notes on stickies for cues at the top of the hour, bottom of the hour and for commercial copy that will have to go out to interrupting the callers who are already blinking up the phone lines in anticipation for another night of coast to coast angst and getting the weight of political worries off their chests. To the right of the engineer, on a cork board sit a stack of stickies with names of callers that are prohibited from calling the show. "Uses the N-word," "Hates Muslims; incites violence," "Profanity," "He's a loon," are some of the scribbled one-liners that follow each of the dozen-plus names. At the top of the hour, the canned intro goes out over the air, and as the second hand sweeps past the twelve, Jon Elliott begins his chat with America ...
