BREAKING NEWS: George Clooney Leaves America After Losing $70 Million in Endorsements: “Politics Destroy

writing—so I guess I can tell it without sustaining too much career damage.

In what seems like several million years ago, then-president George H.W. Bush was running for his second term. During the campaign, Vice President Dan Quayle gave a speech in which he drew the connection between the breakdown of American families—then, as now, a major reason so many families remain poor—and the prevailing attitudes in popular Hollywood entertainment.

After connecting the statistical dots between fatherless households, poverty, and crime, the vice president referred to a storyline in a popular television sitcom, Murphy Brown, in which the lead character has a child out of wedlock. “It doesn’t help matters,” the vice president said, “when primetime TV has Murphy Brown—a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman—mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.’” Hollywood and the liberal media went bananas. Dan Quayle—despite being factually correct in his analysis and moderate in his language—was portrayed as a dangerously unhinged lunatic. We’ve come a long way since then.

Everyone knew that the writers of Murphy Brown were going to respond to the speech, and everyone knew that their response would get huge ratings. And, possibly, affect the outcome of the election. It was weird, obviously: The vice president was a real-life person and Murphy Brown was a fictional character, but back then—before X and Fox News and the kaleidoscopic fragmentation of television channels and choices—a big network television show was a serious piece of political artillery.

Here’s where I come in: I was working in television at the time and somehow came across a copy of the top-secret script of the Murphy Brown season premiere. The teleplay and production of the Murphy Brown response to Dan Quayle’s speech were a total lockdown affair. The scripts were numbered and collected at the end of each day’s rehearsal, and even the network wasn’t allowed to keep copies. But Hollywood is the worst place to try to keep a secret, and somehow a copy found its way to me, a young and mildly Republican comedy writer.

I had in my hands a pretty powerful object, something that I knew my political allies would want to see and prepare a response for. But I was also—and defiantly remain—an absolute coward who didn’t want his fingerprints on any professionally compromising transaction. So what I did was this: I made two copies of the script on my lunch hour, at a copy shop on Gower Avenue, and I FedExed one to my friends in the Bush campaign and one to Rush Limbaugh, just for kicks.

In the end, of course, it didn’t matter. George H.W. Bush lost the race owing to a combination of a youthful governor of Arkansas and a vaguely imbalanced upstart third-party candidate from Dallas.