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// Interlude: An Editorial and Its Rebuttal 
// Story: On Getting to the Bottom of this "Equestrian" Business 
// by McPoodle 
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Interlude: An Editorial and Its Rebuttal


The following is a transcript of a paid political editorial given by Roger Wilkins of The Washington Post which aired on KCBS-LA at 2:30 am on June 16, 1985, after being postponed twice from its intended airing time of 10 am on October 27, 1984. It was accompanied by the instrumental track “Lucifer” by the Alan Parsons Project added by the station management—not that this was supposed to influence your opinion at all while listening to it.




On November 4th, 1980, Far Shooter was elected to be the 40th President of the United States by an overwhelming margin. Many Democrats crossed party lines to vote for him, including myself. At the time, I and many others believed that putting a Markist in the Oval Office was the right thing to do, that someone dedicated to the cause of peace instead of war could do much to calm this troubled world in which we live in. But President Shooter’s confrontations with a petty African dictator soon revealed just how petty our own elected leader could get, and how far he was willing to subvert democracy in order to get what he wanted. These events have been sadly under-reported by the American press, leading to a false belief in the man’s abilities in the wake of his re-election.

Shooter began his presidency on a promising note. The American hostages held in Tehran were released on the day of his inauguration, the result of non-stop negotiating by his team during the very period when conventional wisdom dictated that a newly-elected president should concentrate on building his slate of Cabinet nominees. A revolutionary ‘treaty’ with OPEC followed in early February, leading to the end of America’s catastrophic ‘stagflation’ and the dropping of gas prices by more than $2 a gallon less than two months later.

In June, President Shooter announced a ceasefire in Northern Ireland, and in July he personally walked across the DMZ before getting the leaders of North and South Korea to sit together at the same table for the first time in more than a decade. At this point, the rapid turn-around in the American economy accompanied by his accomplishments abroad had more than satisfied his campaign promises. And then he turned his sights to the Palestinian situation.

President Carter had already accomplished a great deal in the area with the Camp David Accords, but President Shooter announced to the nation his intentions of going beyond that, of finding a two-state solution that all sides could agree on. Perhaps he could have done it, if it wasn’t for a Libyan by the name of Muammar Gaddafi.

Gaddafi was a revolutionary who took over his native Libya in 1969 and transformed it into a socialist state, with himself as ‘Brotherly Leader and Guide to the Revolution’. By nationalizing the nascent oil industry and claiming all of its proceeds, he made himself one of the richest men on earth. From there, he took on wider ambitions of forming a pan-African union, exerting more-or-less total control of Chad, Tunisia and other surrounding nations, and even attempting to join the Warsaw Pact without success. He had just formed an alliance with Syria, and used this as an excuse to butt into the delicate negotiations over the status of Palestine in December of 1980. He soon bullied the Arab states into backing out of peace talks and in a BBC interview on January 3rd of 1981, publicly mocked Shooter’s status as a disreputable leader and a ‘multi-colored freak’.

The day after the interview aired, Shooter sent U.S. fighter carriers into the Gulf of Sidra. Legally, the gulf was in international waters, but Gaddafi had always treated it as being under Libyan sovereignty. All that ships travelling through the gulf had to do to avoid harassment was to fly the Libyan flag next to their own. This was hardly a matter worthy of wasting American manpower on, but President Shooter went ahead anyway. He sent his carriers in with big American flags and no Libyan ones, the Libyan navy investigated, and before you knew it two Libyan jets had been shot down. Shooter proclaimed ‘another victory for democracy’, and went back to trying to lure the Arabs back to the negotiating table. But Gaddafi was a petty man.

On September 5th of 1981, Palestinian terrorists belonging to the Abu Nidel terrorist group took over Pan Am Flight 73 while it was waiting to take off in the Pakistani capital of Karachi. During the takeover, the crew managed to escape, and the plans of the terrorists turned from using the plane to rescue imprisoned Palestinians in Cyprus to killing their hostages one by one until the government of Cyprus agreed to release those same prisoners. Eventually, the terrorists were captured, but not before 43 of the 360 passengers had been killed. In the resulting trial in November of 1983, it was revealed that Abu Nidel did not possess the funds to pull off a foreign operation like this. It turned out that the necessary funding came from a single source: Muammar Gaddafi, who provided the money on condition that the terrorists kill the American passengers first. Again in a BBC interview, Gaddafi admitted that the accusations were true, and cursed the incompetence of the terrorists in letting 42 of the American passengers get away with their lives.

Shooter retaliated in February of 1984, although this time his actions were more justified and better met the threat to America that the Libyan leader had now become: American purchases of Libyan oil were outlawed, and all Libyan assets in America were frozen. If Gaddafi was going to misuse how he spent his country’s money, then a good deal of that money would be taken from him.

Gaddafi’s response was to send three Libyan terrorists to the West Berlin La Belle discothèque, which they blew up on April 5th, 1984, killing 10 people. The nightclub was a favorite spot for American off-duty service members in West Berlin. The next day, CIA operatives intercepted a Telex communication directly from Gaddafi’s second home in Benghazi congratulating the trio on the killing of the most-prominent of the victims: Far Shooter’s estranged stand-up comedian son, Ron Reagan Jr. Gaddafi reveled in how Ron Reagan begged for his life, and how the terrorists took over an hour to kill him.

This was a vile and reprehensible act. If someone had done that to my son, or to yours, it might be understandable that we would want to turn to an act of violence against the man responsible. But Far Shooter was no mere man; he was and still is the President of the United States of America, which should put him above us commoners who elected him. Of all the actions open to him, he took the most extreme, the most-likely to provoke a horrible reaction from the rest of the world: on April 15th, he ordered the most-powerful nuclear weapon in our arsenal to be dropped on Muammar Gaddafi’s head. Now Gaddafi was currently hiding in the middle of Libya’s immense desert, so a bomb that would have killed millions if dropped on a major metropolitan area only wound up killing 50 or so Libyans. None of those Libyans was Muammar Gaddafi, so on top of proving he was as petty as his enemy, the President also proved that he was incompetent, or at least that the sources of his intelligence were. Along with Gaddafi’s body double and dozens of innocent Bedouins, the list of victims included Hanna Gaddafi, Muammar’s four-year old daughter.

Less than a month later, Chad revolutionaries invaded Libya and defeated the Libyan army at Maaten al-Sarra. This humiliation immediately led to the breakup of Gaddafi’s pan-African union, his most-cherished dream. For once, Gaddafi did not respond with an act of petty violence, but instead one of devastating knowledge: he assisted a team of international reporters in uncovering proof that not only did the Chadian army receive funding and training from the CIA, but also that the CIA had been at work all around the world and from the moment President Shooter was sworn in; supporting revolutionary groups in secret using funding diverted from other projects approved by Congress. Let me make this clear: the president who ran on a policy of being the ultimate peace-maker was secretly responsible for half of the world’s wars, all with the insane, unachievable goal of destabilizing the Soviet Union, a nation that Far Shooter scrupulously avoided saying anything about during his term as president.

This is not a man who deserves to be elected to a second term. You’ll notice that I’ve said nothing about his domestic policies, as they are the kind that are always supported by the Republican Party when they are in power, to be condemned as always by the Democratic Party when they are not in power. No, this is something that goes beyond partisanship, a massive flaw in the character of this man.

Far Shooter responded to Gaddafi’s allegations by publically turning firmly against the Soviet Union, calling it the ‘root of all evil in the world today’ and completely abandoning all claims of ever being a peacemaker. He said that he was funding the Contras, the Mujahedeen, UNITA, and a dozen other groups of doubtful morality for our own good, and that we could trust him to do the right thing, bypassing the ‘messiness’ of Washington D.C. politics by not telling Congressmen—or the public—of what they really didn’t need to know. Well, I have another name for Washington D.C. politics, and that name is ‘democracy’. We cannot allow this man to get away with so much gross hypocrisy. And so I am asking you to go to the polls in two weeks and send a clear message that we will not accept so petty a man as this as the leader of the free world.



The television station that aired that editorial then immediately followed it with an encore broadcast of the President’s Address to the Markist Historical Society of Ireland from earlier that day, an address that was meant to convey to the world how America would react to Yuri Andropov becoming leader of the Soviet Union (accompanied by “Themes from Rambo: First Blood Part Two”):




We are approaching the end of a bloody century plagued by a terrible political invention—totalitarianism. Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy's enemies have refined their instruments of repression. Yet optimism is in order because day by day democracy is proving itself to be a not at all fragile flower. From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than thirty years to establish their legitimacy. But none—not one regime—has yet been able to risk free elections. Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root.

Historians looking back at our time will note the consistent restraint and peaceful intentions of the West. They will note that it was the democracies who refused to use the threat of their nuclear monopoly in the Forties and early Fifties for territorial or imperial gain. Had that nuclear monopoly been in the hands of the Communist world, the map of Europe—indeed, the world—would look very different today. And certainly they will note it was not the democracies that invaded Afghanistan or suppressed Polish Solidarity or used chemical and toxin warfare in Afghanistan and Southeast Asia.

If history teaches anything, it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly. We see around us today the marks of our terrible dilemma—predictions of doomsday, antinuclear demonstrations, an arms race in which the West must, for its own protection, be an unwilling participant. At the same time we see totalitarian forces in the world who seek subversion and conflict around the globe to further their barbarous assault on the human spirit. What, then, is our course? Must civilization perish in a hail of fiery atoms? Must freedom wither in a quiet, deadening accommodation with totalitarian evil?

Our enemies must understand this: We will never give away our freedom. We will never abandon our belief in a Higher Power—whether that be God or Goddess. And we will never stop searching for a genuine peace.

Let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness—pray they will discover the joy of knowing a Higher Power. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the State, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.

It was C.S. Lewis who, in his unforgettable ‘Screwtape Letters,’ wrote: ‘The greatest evil is not done now…in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is…not even done in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result, but it is conceived and ordered; moved, seconded, carried and minuted in clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.’

[An image of Yuri Andropov, the very picture of a ‘quiet man with a white collar and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks’ appears on the screen.]

Well, because these ‘quiet men’ do not ‘raise their voices,’ because they sometimes speak in soothing tones of brotherhood and peace, because, like other dictators before them, they’re always making ‘their final territorial demand,’ some would have us accept them at their word and accommodate ourselves to their aggressive impulses. But if history teaches anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.

So let me speak truth to power: Our struggle is nothing less than that of Right vs. Wrong, Good vs. Evil. And the Soviet Union is most certainly an evil empire, among the most evil this world has ever witnessed.

While America’s military strength is important, let me add here that I’ve always maintained that the struggle now going on for the world will never be decided by bombs or rockets, by armies or military might. The real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith.

Whittaker Chambers, the Christian whose own religious conversion made him a witness to one of the terrible traumas of our time, the Hiss-Chambers case, wrote that the crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which the West is indifferent to God, the degree to which it collaborates in Communism’s attempt to make man stand alone without God. And then he said, for Marxism-Leninism is actually the second-oldest faith, first proclaimed in the Garden of Eden with the words of temptation, ‘Ye shall be as gods.’

The Western world can answer this challenge, he wrote, ‘but only provided that its faith in God and the freedom He enjoins is as great as Communism’s faith in Man.’

I believe we shall rise to the challenge. I believe that Communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written—that the march of freedom and democracy will, in our own lifetimes, leave Communism on the Ash-Heap of History, as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people. I believe this because the source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual. And because it knows no limitation, it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man. For in the words of Isaiah: ‘He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might He increased strength. But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary.’

Yes, change your world. One of our founding fathers and the author of the immortal Common Sense, Firebrand, said, ‘We have it within our power to begin the world over again.’ We can do it, doing together what no one spiritual organization could do by itself. Let us have a crusade for freedom.

May the Goddess bless you, and thank you very much.