And The Conservatives Thought They Had It Bad With Keith Olbermann...

Ollie has always been opinionated and politically active. And he did spend a goodly amount of time writing his Queen’s Gambit column for the local paper in Star City. So is it any surprise that the local talk radio station might have hit upon the idea of giving the local liberal poster boy his own show or that Ollie might welcome the chance to speak his mind to the masses?

Of course the show wasn’t quite what anyone involved in producing the show expected. But the people who knew Ollie best weren’t shocked at all when the ratings tanked as Ollie failed to find an audience.

Why? Because Ollie turned out to be a fair and balanced host who went after both the left and the right with equal amounts of annoyance. He criticized the idle rich conservatives he lived among for their apathy to the working man AND the bohemian liberals who thought all you needed to do to make a difference is write a check or go buy the cast album to RENT. Hard to build an audience in talk radio without catering to one audience or the other but the ratings did go through the roof simply because everyone loved to argue with him. But Ollie, amazingly enough, got sick of arguing with everyone else.

The final straw was a special show on Hunting Issues in which he managed to alienate both the local chapter president of the National Hunters Association (“You say you need an assault rifle to go deer hunting. I say you need to learn how to aim!”) and the state chairman of Animals Are People Too! (“You say meat is murder and I think you’re right. Because after a week stuck on an island eating roots and twigs, I was ready to kill for a good cheeseburger.”)

After that, Ollie just got too sick of hearing everyone and their mother complaining about his opinions to be bothered with venting his spleen on anything other than a soap box. Besides, it’s much more effective for Green Arrow to appear at a fund raiser for Save the Wolves than to appear on MSNBC screaming about the so-called “sportsmanship” of wolf hunting from a helicopter in Alaska.