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John immediately dismissed my earnest inquiry by barking something to the effect of, “Ah, leave me alone!!” Then, after a few moments of quiet, he calmly made one of the most shocking statements I have ever heard someone in his position make. John Kobylt said to me, “Actually, it is what I really believe, because trying to control Muslims is like trying to control Black people… it will never happen…it's not in their make up.”

(I contemporaneously told both my Program Director and General Manager about this statement and they didn't seem to care. I also told my union leadership. This is not the only statement John has made that made me come to the conclusion that he is probably a racist. Here he is talking about the intelligence of TSA airport screeners.

While there is some plausible deniability there, in a profession with uniforms, mandatory grooming standards, no significant public interaction, and high percentage of minorities, on what exactly is John evaluating their intelligence other than race? Even Ken seemed very uncomfortable with where John went with that one.)

It takes a lot to stun me into silence, but John's statement about Muslims and Blacks did the trick. I had no idea what to say in response to this blatantly racist statement, so, I don't recall saying much at all other than nervously mumbling “Really?”

The commercial ended and we went on the air to do the tease like we had done almost every day for the previous year and a half. When John threw it to me I used an EXACT phrase that I had used before when we had gone at each other over Iraq when it cause absolutely no problem between us (and where I was told by at least one member of management that it was great radio). After listing some of the things I was going to talk about at 7 pm, I said I would also examine how it is that someone “as smart as John Kobylt could have his head up his ass on Iraq .”

I was almost as shocked by John's on-air reaction as I was by his racist explanation for being against the Iraq War. Since the John & Ken show is mostly fake, and John is basically an actor, I was not sure if his boisterous admonitions for me to “Get out!!!” of the studio were real, or, like most everything else he does, simply done for effect. I had to make an instantaneous evaluation of the situation and I knew that I did not want to wuss out in the face of John Kobylt's bullying on one of my signature issues with just a couple minutes to go before my show was to start.

Deciding that since this was radio and not television (and therefore John could decide to spin it anyway he wanted to) I decided to mostly remain quiet. After John finished the segment with me sitting there in mostly stunned silence, Kobylt went off on me in a profanity-laced tirade falsely claiming that he had told me not to confront him today because he wasn't in the mood.

I knew that I had done nothing really wrong and that John had created at least 90% of the circumstances that allowed the situation to get out of hand. But even still, I had the feeling, knowing the political realities of me being the evening host and John being in the afternoon catbird seat, that I was the one who would likely get in trouble. I had to quickly decide how to handle the circumstances once my show started. While in retrospect I should have just told the story of what John had said off the air and gone on the offense, I ended up taking the highest of roads in what may have been my finest moment at KFI (though, sadly, no audio still exists).

I proceeded to calmly explain why I think the Iraq War was and is just, and I ended my unscripted and unplanned commentary by predicting (laughably now) that years from now John Kobylt and I would one day share a beer and toast the fact that we have an ally and a military base in the heart of the Middle East that makes the world a safer place for future generations of Americans. Leah Brandon was literally cheering in the news booth.

For the rest of the show I made no mention of the altercation and no one said anything to me. By the next morning I still didn't have any idea for sure how things were going to shake out. My first indication came when I got an e-mail from one of Bill Handel's producers .

Bill (who had been VERY good to me since even before I even took the job at KFI and was one of the main reasons I felt comfortable about making the move to Los Angeles) had invited me that upcoming weekend to an annual party at his house that was designed to thank the sales staff for making him so much money. The year before, the fact that I had been invited and John & Ken were not, had even become a minor issue on the air as John & Ken mocked me for inadvertently revealing the “snub.”

I believe the reason that John & Ken were not invited was that Bill Handel hates them more than he despises Hezbollah. His feelings of animosity towards them (as he articulated them towards me) are visceral and founded in his apparent belief that they are frauds as well as professional jealousy from John & Ken benefiting so much from the timing of the 1995 O.J. Simpson trial.

So, knowing how Bill feels about John, when I got this e-mail from Bill's producer the morning after the big blow up between John Kobylt and me, I honestly thought it was a practical joke.

After I read the e-mail a few more times it occurred to me that Bill would not send a joke like that through one of his producers and so I called his answering service (Bill is apparently a bigger star than I realized) to find out what was up. When he called me back he proceeded to explain that I had been at fault in the altercation because I had, “Violated the sanctity of the studio.” Bill told me that John Kobylt “owns” that studio until 7 pm and when he told me to leave, I needed to leave immediately (even though in my mind largely shutting up was the same as obeying Kobylt's “commands”).

Frankly, in my ten years in talk radio I had never heard of this “sanctity” of the studio theory and I was utterly shocked that this dubious view of the “rules” was clearly a rationalization for Bill to somehow come down on the side of a person he despises (John Kobylt) over someone he had treated as a friend. Obviously Bill decided it was in his best interest to support the view that the boss had already come to (like a lot of bosses, she is a master at asking people for their opinion and magically having them know, and give her, exactly what she wants to hear).

Amazingly, Bill not only sided against me, he even chose to make that known “publicly” because once a producer knows what is up, everyone at KFI would know what Bill's position was. Since he was perceived as my friend, his position on this was particularly damaging to my cause (kind of like a “conservative” radio talk show host flipping on the Iraq War, which btw, Bill Handel did as well). I chuckled at Bill and, knowing that it would not help matters for me to really let him have it, I quickly ended the conversation now secure in the knowledge that, as I has suspected all along, Bill Handel was not to be trusted. I was also totally convinced that I was now in even worse trouble than I had previously realized.

The absurdity and hypocrisy of Bill's view on what happened would become laughably clear just a couple of months later. In an act so bizarre and directly in contradiction to his recent statements to me that I could not have possibly made it up if I had tried my best, Bill stormed in the studio of a DJ on an FM Clear Channel sister station while she was on the air, where he was not invited, dropped numerous profanities, and threatened violence; all because he felt that his spoiled/hellion twin daughters (who had been taunting DJ Jaime White outside her studio) had somehow been mistreated.

Here is the incredible audio of what happened .

So much for Bill's “sanctity of the studio” theory.

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