Posted on 06/08/2004 10:02:51 PM PDT by KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle
Excuse me while I barf. I’m in no mood to join the joyful eulogies upon the passing of Ronald Reagan—remembrances that prove, once again, the staggering size of our country’s memory hole. I missed the 1960s. I grew up in Middle America, with Watergate, barely, and the benign buffoonery of Presidents Ford and Carter. When Reagan was elected president, it was an inexplicable, savage turn for a country that I’d never realized was capable of such things.
It’s not just that George W. Bush would have been impossible without Reagan. The presidency of Reagan himself was so bad, on so many levels, that as young adults a sizable number of us could only sputter in impotent rage, a rage summed up nicely by the Crucifucks song “Hinckley Had a Vision.” It simply made no sense that an entire country could be run by sinister thugs, all because its spokesperson was a washed-up actor with the professional training to deliver the most ridiculous, venal lies with a calming “Great Communicator” demeanor.
Great Communicator, my ass. Tens of thousands of us died of AIDS on his watch, and he never even once mentioned the word. He also refused to adequately fund AIDS research—a critical delay that, we now know, could have saved countless lives. We seem to have forgotten that now.
We’ve also forgotten the corruption—not just the Constitution-shredding outrage of the Iran-Contra scandal, but a modern record for the number of criminally indicted officials.
It was the Great Communicator whose era gave us the term, and scourge, of homelessness. It was Reagan who launched an illegal war in Nicaragua, Reagan who unleashed and praised Guatemala’s genocide and El Salvador’s death squads. Reagan whose tax cuts and funding choices launched a class war at home, a class war still being waged, successfully, by many of the same officials, 20 years later.
And excuse me, but Ronald Reagan did not end communism. Hundreds of thousands of courageous people, in Moscow and Gdansk and Prague and across the communist bloc, deserve the credit for risking their lives to bring down tyrannical governments, often with nothing more than the willingness to sacrifice their own bodies. They risked everything. Reagan risked nothing but an inadvertent record deficit it took a decade and a Democratic president to heal.
To honor Reagan as the triumphant Cold Warrior, without even mentioning the courage of all those ordinary people, is an insult of staggering proportions. Ronald Reagan had a historic meltdown of an empire happen during his tenure; he was no more responsible for it than George W. Bush was responsible for another, less positive cataclysm in 2001. Less, even. At least the CIA knew something like 9/11 was in the works. They had no idea the Iron Curtain would collapse.
Last week, I mourned the passing of David Dellinger, a contemporary of Reagan’s who exemplified, far better than Ronnie ever could, courage and integrity and compassion. Dellinger spent his adult life speaking truth to power; Reagan spent his making things up for an audience. One was an apostle of selfless love; the other presided over the Me Decade.
Not all of us spent that decade obsessing over our investments and stepping over the homeless. For much of my 20s, I helped organize protests of hundreds of thousands of people on the Mall and at the Pentagon and elsewhere in Washington, D.C. Most of us are still around. Most of us remember the profound sense of shock as we watched our country become a place we didn’t recognize, led by a genial, seemingly clueless man with an agenda that was on many levels simply evil.
Sound familiar? Forget the obituaries; I can hardly wait to unseat Ronald Reagan’s heir in November.
People don't seem to remember that Bill Clinton was the first President ever to engage in activity that put him at risk of contacting AIDS.
My email:
Read your column online.
Couldn't help but wonder how exactly RR could have prevented "tens of thousands" of AIDS deaths.
No one has cured it yet, twenty-some years on, despite having spent an order of magnitude more on AIDS research than on Cancer.
The only ones who could have prevented the spread of AIDS were the ones doing the spreading.
A "breeder" who was my next door neighbor was infected in the eighties as the result of a blood transfusion for routine surgery, and as a result was one of the first AIDS fatalities in the country.
I wonder if she would blame RR, or the Sodomists who couldn't seem to control their unrestrained buggery, and who are resposible for her infection.
If RR had done or said the only things that could have made any difference at all for these unfortunate "victims" of their own lack of self-control (a crowbar prying you out of each others rectums comes to mind) the shrieks of "Keep out of our bedrooms (bath houses?)" would have shattered glass on the other side of the planet.
Have a nice day...
They ain't even done with that yet. Recently there was a college campus protest somewhere because a blood drive was organized in which a pre-donation questionnaire asks if the prospective donor has engaged in anal sex with men. Of course, that was a disqualifying factor, and the jerks cried holy hell over 'discrimination' against homosexuals as blood donors.
And now that you're an old adult, Geov (what kind of name is that?), nothing has changed, as is evidenced by this ignorant rant.
Well, he did get something right
Rearrange his sentences to view the secret message: "My ass, Great Communicator of AIDS."
There is a kernel of truth here. Reagan might have done more by using the bully pulpit to get states to close gay bath houses, banish the diseased and sexually promiscuous to the old sanitariums away from society as they did with those who contracted tuberculosis, and embark on intensive reeducation, testing and notification programs for gays, not that gays would have liked any of this. I can hear the screams now.
In Reagan's defense, he would have been blocked in the courts on civil rights grounds, and there were no other leaders around who had courage to take the aggressive steps necessary to protect those who indiscriminately engaged in unprotected sex, and thus save millions of lives worldwide.
Glenn asked him for proof, and the caller said it is all there if you "read between the lines." In other words, he was making everything up just like this guy here.
The caller was then given a suggestion that would stop the spread of AIDS, and that was to stop having unprotected sex. This can be done for free, but my point is that these liberals never want to take PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY for anything. When the government doesn't bail them out for their years of sin and debauchery, they never look within themselves to examine the cause of their grief.
We will never get anywhere in our society by slapping band-aids on every problem. By throwing money at things like this we will only keep slipping into the abyss.
RR was responsible for the Orphan Drug Act which did more for AIDS research than could have been done if the entire budget had been dedicated to eliminating HIV. Liberals, being Symbolists, totally discount any action in favor of Symbols and of Caring. The AIDS vehicles in the homosexual commnity want to be loved and comforted much more than they want tobe cured.
Translation (excuse my French): Dellinger gave Parrish more manlove-bjs than he made Parrish give him.
"unrestrained buggery"
LMAO
Peggy Noonan called it first.
RR actually did the only effective thing that he could have done about AIDS. He signed the Orphan Drugs Act.
MODS: the Seattle Weekly is not a "blog."
Lies are the point.
Lie about as much as possible about Ronald Reagan so some of it sticks.
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