[Morton Downey Jr.] holds court in the aromatic marshes of New Jersey, under the shadow of the steely smog-scrapers of the New York City skyline. At the Meadowlands Hilton, where Downey houses his guests, I meet up with Steve Comley, an irrepressible nursing-home administrator-turned-antinuclear activist. He was on Downey's show last summer, taped in New Hampshire. As we make our way across the parking lot here in Exxon, N.J., to Downey's studio, we pass a crowd of raucous males lined up around the building. Comley turns to me and whispers, "The animals want to feed."

When the show resumes, Comley and Strangelove fire some opening shots at each other. During the next break the producer comes up behind Comley and says, "Be more aggressive. Stand up to those guys. Interrupt." After the station break, Comley stands up and interrupts. Downey tells him to zip it. The animals cheer.

My liberal friends will later accuse me of antinuclear jingoism. But the crowd cheers and shouts down the DOE hack as [Mort] calls for a station break. Later the DOE hack, undaunted, explains how the rock in Nevada, where they want to bury the nuclear waste, has remained stable for a billion years. "Oh sure," yells Mort. "You were there to see it a billion years ago."