I didn’t pitch the “ended a scourge called Communism” joke, nor did the other (shh!) conservative on staff. If one of us did, we would have been roundly mocked for pushing our agenda, and more than likely, punches would have been thrown, and after a bloody melee, we would have triumphed, only to be fired.

No, the line in question came from writers whose agenda was to get a laugh, and what better way to do so than to make our occasionally dim lead character sound like Ronald Reagan? Or that’s the “thinking.”