He steers the ship.

Two reasons. First Opie convinced Anthony that the "divide and conquer" strategy was always bad, convincing Anthony to stay even if he was offered a separate gig. Second reason is good cop bad cop. Opie would be the good cop when Anthony went racial. Opie's small snide racial comments make me think that he is more racist than Ant was, but he would pull the "oh brother, not this again" when Ant went off on blacks. If the whole show teamed up on racial matters they would have been thrown off the air a long time ago.

I don't think Opie consciously did one fucking thing. He had Ant to launch the ship, steer the ship, and eventually sink the ship. Opie could have been ANYONE.

He was the titular head: Ant was too pussy to exert any similar dominance, and Jimmy was beholden "at the pleasure of Opie and Anthony". The staff were Sirius employees and had to tow the line.

Ant seemed happier to divulge any responsibility, formerly, to Gregg so he could continue on his path of talking shit with divergency from culpability. His passive attitude allowed Opie's misplaced ego to flourish.

The heads at Sirius were basically bean counters, not really “radio guys”. With the XM merger a lot of the programming was left in these executives’ hands, and given that O&A came over from XM (and before that WNEW, where they actually got good provable ratings) they were essentially left alone, despite Opie’s constant bitching.

We're singing from the same hymnbook, my friend.

*Toe the line

My mistake. I'm a tit.

I know it's very trendy to shit on Opie. And I dislike Opie mostly for his personality. But the truth is, he was a big part of the success of O&A. It was a combination of all of them. They all had strengths, and weaknesses. And together they fit really well. Anthony's weaknesses were that he's afraid of confrontation, and he wants to blabber on about politics. Norton would just ramble on about trannies and sex shit. Opie kept it together, and kept it flowing.

By keeping it flowing, you mean interrupting an interesting/ funny conversation to go to the phones to bring up a dead topic from 10 minutes ago? I forget what show I was listening to the other day, but he had to keep interrupting Ant and Patrice for the next few minutes so he could take phone calls on how Massachusetts was opening up the toll lanes to ease traffic congestion.

Who gives a flying fuck about traffic jams?

Opie got lucky. Anyone could have done that. Most would have done it better.

He's a on mic producer. Hard to get rid of a guy like that. I think people thought he could be the next Howard, so they let him be him. If you listen to him on JRE, you hear this relaxed likeable person. It's really strange. If he was that guy on the radio, he'd be good.