‘Hat of the Day: Mike Benedetto
Liberals, conservatives, libertarians and others can disagree vehemently on just about everything on which reasonable people can disagree, and then some. Often discussions get heated, partisans bear their teeth, and it becomes exceedingly difficult to remember that the guy you are arguing with is not Satan incarnate, but a fundamentally decent fellow who just happens to see the world differently from you.
We are reminded that most people are decent whenever a national tragedy strikes. In the wake of 9-11, hardly anyone was a Democrat or Republican; we were all Americans, and we were all New Yorkers. No Democrat (or at least, no prominent one) played politics against Bush and Guiliani simply because they were members of the wrong party. Even Al Gore, who has since gone completely batty, was respectful of the President at the time. And, as best I can determine, not one Republican from flyover country said “screw New York, they’re a blue state.”
Still, while most people you may disagree with vehemently are decent people of goodwill, a few of them are not. It is times like these when your fundamentally decent but vociferous opponents separate themselves from the ones who really are the scum that they seem to be. One such example is Noam Chomsky, who, mere weeks after 9-11, wrote that U.S. foreign policy was worse. Another is today’s asshat, Mike Benedetto. While others all across the political spectrum pay their respects to the Gipper (or, at a minimum, judiciously decline to bash him on this occasion), Mikey’s contribution to the blogosphere is to compare Reagan to Hitler, and blame him for the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Well done, Michael. You’ve proven that the rabid Reagan haters never went away, even 15 years after the poor guy left office, and 10 years after he was diagnosed with a terrible disease. Shame on you - though I suspect you don’t have any, else you wouldn’t have posted this vile trash in the first place.
In case this loathesome, hateful jerk of a blogger attempts to cover his tracks by editing the post, here it is, in its entirety, as of 1:50 p.m. PDT today:
Sometimes there’s God so quickly. And sometimes he takes his damn time.
Nixon, Reagan and Bush Jr. were the three principal stages in the utter destruction of the GOP — its slide into corruption, false piety and insane public policy that’s done irreparable damage to the country and the world. And then there’s the little matter of ignoring AIDS for nearly the entire duration of his presidency, an act of cruelty unfathomable to even the Republicans of today.
So no, I don’t feel like giving him the respectful treatment due a human being, like talking about his long painful illness and the handful of positive things he accomplished while in power. Fuck him. Hitler’s got a roommate now.
UPDATE: It just keeps getting better. Apparently, a few too many readers have sent him emails offering him a nice, fresh cup of STFU, so now Mikey is playing the victim. In a comment, he preemptively blames me for the hate mail he expects to receive as a result of my having linked to his post. Since I’m going to get all the credit anyway, feel free to oblige him, but please, keep it civil. Or if not civil, at least non-threatening, and not homophobic. Tell him what a jerk he was to write this stuff, but don’t lower yourself to his level.
UPDATE x2: Meanwhile, while back pissing in his own sandbox, Mikey refuses to quit while he’s behind, and posts a new entry patting himself on the back for being such a great guy in posting his tripe the other day. And in his original thread, he nominates himself for a Chutzpah Award by taking a commenter to task for being “abusive” - to him! I posted a reply comment noting that after spewing hateful garbage like that, he’s in no position to lecture anyone else about being abusive. Apparently, Mikey can’t take what he dishes out, though, so rather than see the comment go up immediately, I got the following message, instead:
Thank You for Commenting
Your comment has been received. To protect against malicious comments, I have enabled a feature that allows your comments to be held for approval the first time you post a comment. I’ll approve your comment when convenient; there is no need to re-post your comment. Return to the comment page
It’s good to know how careful Mikey is being about preventing “malicious comments” from making it through, unless such comments emanate from him.
Yes, Brad, you are just as lowly and despicable as Michael is. The only reason he got the ‘Hat and you didn’t was because I found his bile first. Kudos to both of you for giving us all a great, non-homophobic reason to despise you.
June 6th, 2004 at 2:01 pm
Disgusting, but totally predictable. Gays have little to blame but themselves for the pandemic of AIDS. Fighting common sense health proposals left and right, etc. etc. etc….but it was “Reagan’s fault.” Almost as funny as when Magic Johnson chastised Geo. Bush I for “not doing enough.” Hey Magic — you did too many — women, that is, unprotected. But “it’s Bush’s fault.”
We get it. No, actually, we don’t.
June 6th, 2004 at 2:07 pm
We are reminded that most people are decent whenever a national tragedy strikes. In the wake of 9-11, hardly anyone was a Democrat or Republican; we were all Americans, and we were all New Yorkers. No Democrat (or at least, no prominent one) played politics against Bush and Guiliani simply because they were members of the wrong party. Even Al Gore, who has since gone completely batty, was respectful of the President at the time. And, as best I can determine, not one Republican from flyover country said “screw New York, they’re a blue state.”
Yet conservatives had not the slightest qualm about exploiting that tragedy to further political ends that horrified most New Yorkers. It’s called lip service, and I don’t believe in performing it.
Thanks for the weeks of hate mail you’ve sent my way.
June 6th, 2004 at 2:16 pm
Go ahead, Mike, blame me for the hate mail you earned yourself by spewing your own hate. Everything else is someone else’s fault, so I guess this might as well be, too.
June 6th, 2004 at 5:15 pm
More hate for you:
http://www.bradlands.com/weblog/archives/2004_06.shtml#000223
June 6th, 2004 at 5:27 pm
Duly noted.
June 6th, 2004 at 5:41 pm
The Gentleman’s Code instructs us that a gentleman never gives offense intentionally. Thus, we may judge. The Code also instructs us that he who does give intentional offense is to be met with either ostracism or a challenge. Thus, we know how to respond. Is more required?
June 6th, 2004 at 5:42 pm
Nope, ostracism will do just fine.
June 6th, 2004 at 6:51 pm
On the subject of anger about the Reagan administration’s approach to AIDS, check out this letter from NGLTF: http://www.thetaskforce.org/news/release.cfm?releaseID=690
June 6th, 2004 at 7:26 pm
Blogging Lesson #4: How to Avoid Hate Mail
If you don’t want hate mail…don’t make inflammatory comments….
June 6th, 2004 at 7:29 pm
http://www.indegayforum.org/authors/murdock/murdock4.html
June 6th, 2004 at 7:47 pm
BY the way, the Task Force article is totally shameful. If they want to place blame for the spread of AIDS on anyone they could place a little on the shoulders of Diane Fienstein and her San Francisco cohorts who refused to shut the San Fran bathhouses down. You can also lay a little blame on the men who actually spread the disease. As the Indepedent Gay Forum pice mentions, they could have dumped half of the federal budget into AIDS research, but it wouldn’t have mattered,
“You could have poured half the national budget into AIDS in 1983, and it would have gone down a rat hole,” says Michael Fumento, author of BioEvolution: How Biotechnology Is Changing Our World. “There were no anti-virals back then. The first anti-viral was AZT which came along in 1987, and that was for AIDS.” As an example of how blindly scientists and policymakers flew as the virus took wing, Fumento recalls that “in 1984, Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler predicted that there would be an AIDS vaccine by 1986. There is no AIDS vaccine to date.”
June 6th, 2004 at 8:42 pm
One point on the AIDS part of this discussion:
Is everyone forgetting that the vast majority of people who have AIDS now are NOT gay? Gays didn’t make this disease- they were simply the first demographic drastically affected.
I don’t think ANYONE could have reacted well to the early stages of this pandemic- we didn’t know enough. Second-guessing a now dead man is pointless, and I agree with X that there are people on both sides who just want to spout rhetoric.
The rest of us aren’t interested in that nonsense.
June 6th, 2004 at 8:58 pm
Ronald Reagan was a complex man. It may be bad form to criticize him after he died, but it may be just as bad to beatify him for sainthood. He was, after all is said and done, a politician. And politics require occasional decisions based on expediency, regardless of morals.
Reagan can, and has, been fairly criticized regarding his response to the AIDS crises from both Left and Right. It is a fact that he said little regarding AIDS for the first 7 years. As with any epidemic, the beginning of it is where the leadership of a quick response would have done the most good. This didn’t happen, even as far as ensuring the safety of the nation’s blood supply. Remember Ryan White?
And at the time, Reagan was also criticized from the Right, who felt that he should be out on the pulpit condemning the evils of homosexuality with Buchanan. But again, he said nothing.
It’s also true that he and Nancy had long-time friendships with many gay people, such as William Haines, from their Hollywood days. So perhaps he did not want to encourage the Religious Right’s prejudices. But he still needed their votes, So maybe remaining silent was the expedient thing to do.
That being said, it’s not surprising that gay men are still angry with him. What is surprising is that there are a few, like myself, left around to be angry.
June 6th, 2004 at 9:02 pm
What the hell did you gay guys expect Reagan to do?, Go down to San Francisco, slap the dick out of your mouth and shout, “hey, dumbass, stop having anonymous, unprotected with whatever hole you see?”
June 6th, 2004 at 9:16 pm
Reagan Tributes Worth Reading
Outside the Beltway has an excellent roundup of media tributes. Being American in T.O. covers the Canadian perspective quite well. A Little More to the Right posts the entire text of Reagan’s farewell address, while American RealPolitik chose to post …
June 6th, 2004 at 11:25 pm
Actually, I’d say that Michael should get the award even if you had discovered Brad first. Mike’s about an 8 on the moonbat hate scale (MHS) where Brad’s only about a 6. Then again, Al Gore has demonstrated quite adroitly that falling off the edge of sanity results in rapidly increasing MHS numbers.
June 7th, 2004 at 6:05 am
Gotta disagree with you, X. More liberals than not are just like this guy. 9/11 wasn’t that much different. Michael Moore, Susan Sontag, Katha Pollit — think of some of the things those people said and wrote while we were still looking for the bodies and tell me again how liberals rose above their hatred after 9/11.
June 7th, 2004 at 6:57 am
No one is denying that the hate America fringe exists. I’ve given one example (Chomsky), you’ve give three more. But look at those with political careers. Nancy Pelosi didn’t act like that. David Bonior didn’t. Even “Baghdad Jim” McDermott somehow managed to keep his mouth shut for quite some time. The only Congresscritter I can think of who didn’t was Cynthia McKinney, and we all know what happened to her.
June 7th, 2004 at 7:15 am
“More liberals than not are just like this guy. 9/11 wasn’t that much different. Michael Moore, Susan Sontag, Katha Pollit – think of some of the things those people said and wrote while we were still looking for the bodies and tell me again how liberals rose above their hatred after 9/11.” — Spoons, above
“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’” Falwell’s rationale is that the secularization of America has provoked God “to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.” - Jerry Falwell, 9/14/01
June 7th, 2004 at 7:59 am
Didn’t real dollars for AIDS research increase every year during Reagan’s administration? Hard to argue he did nothing about it.
June 7th, 2004 at 8:21 am
For a great discussion of the early response to the AIDS epidemic, read Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On. Any increases for AIDS funding in the early 1980s were voted in by Congress, despite the Reagan administration and not because of it. Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler was constantly instructed to tell Congress that the administration had more money than it needed, when that was far from true. Look at the Tylenol scare; Legionnaire’s disease; Toxic Shock Syndrome: the governmental response was swift. Not so with AIDS.
June 7th, 2004 at 8:24 am
It was Reagan’s fault that gays had unprotected sex that spread a deadly STD into the population. Why didn’t the Administration just let the Reds invade, so they could throw gay people into the gulag (were they coulnd’t enjoy sticking their weiners into holes in bathhouses, etc)?
June 7th, 2004 at 8:43 am
Tin Man, your examples prove my point. Falwell was roundly denounced by conservatives for those comments, and he quickly apologized. Nothing similar has happened on the other side, because the comments cited here represent mainstream liberal views.
June 7th, 2004 at 9:01 am
I note that even though BoiFromTroy linked to Michael’s original rant, he felt it necessary to repost his comments (anonymously!) in the comments to the same Boi post. Wonder how many other blogs he’s commented at.
As far as AIDS, there wasn’t a damn thing Reagan could have done in 1984 except increase funding for educating medical researchers and making drug company research into treatment profitiable. The lead time needed for these treatments to be developed was unavoidable, no matter how much of a tantrum one throws. Comparing response times for AIDS to those of bacterial infections, as one poster does, is at best ignorant.
June 7th, 2004 at 9:36 am
Reagan was certainly not akin to Adolf Hitler. However, what can be said for his administrations’s response to the growing AIDS epidemic is that had it been a disease that initially afflicted another segment of society, the response likely would have been swift. Look at SARS & Crutchfeld-Jacobs. It is clear that was neglected due to being thought of as being in the “aberrant gay community”. Attitudes have changed alot since then …. hopefully for the better.
June 7th, 2004 at 9:46 am
Spoons, I’m not familiar with what Moore or Sontag said, but I think you’re referring to comments that 9/11 was the U.S.’s fault, etc. I doubt you’ll find many people, including most liberals, who would agree with such ridiculous ideas.
But your original point was that “More liberals than not are just like this guy” (i.e. Mike), and then you wrote, “Tell me again how liberals rose above their hatred after 9/11.” A problem with politics on both sides is that too many people refer to “the right” or “the left” or “conservatives” or “liberals,” when the truth is that any such polarizing generalizations blur the truth that we’re a bunch of human beings with disparate viewpoints, not members of monolithic lock-step groups. I’d rather not be lumped with Moore and Sontag, thank you very much.
Kevin, I don’t know enough science, but again, I’d recommend And the Band Played On, in which Shilts denounces not just the Reagan administration but also all the gay men who, in denial, continued having unprotected sex. Counterfactuals are usually pointless, but I bet Reagan would have spoken out had AIDS first affected heterosexuals.
June 7th, 2004 at 10:03 am
fatmouse , shucks, et al.
It’s easy to blame AIDS victims for the disease because they are already unpopular. But a virus doesn’t care about your sexual orientation, morality, or political affiliation. AIDS happened to infect gay men first. But a disease could have just as easily spread among heterosexuals first. As it did in the 1900’s in the great Influenza pandemic. No doubt there were people like you at the time, also blaming the victims.
June 7th, 2004 at 10:12 am
Who is blaming the victims? You act if AIDS was in the water supply or something. I don’t wish death on anyone, but if a dude gets drunk and drives his car into a tree, is it my fault? The vast majority of this disese was spread at the beginning by unsafe behaviour. The ” happened to infect gay men” is a great bit of revisionist history, given what we know about the gay culture (especially in the SF area) in the early 80s. I guaruanntee if this had been instead limited to heterosexual prostitutes, you would have still heard nothing. You put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger and then try to blame someone else?
June 7th, 2004 at 10:19 am
While Lachlan’s other points were fine, I can’t let erroneous assertions slide even if they’re not germane to the discussion (that’s one way that conventional wisdom gets messed up).
Heterosexuals do not constitute the majority of HIV cases. According to NAID (a part of the NIH), 60% of new HIV cases are due to homosexual sex, 25% due to dirty needles, and 15% due to heterosexual sex. (Implying that AIDS is still primarily a gay problem)
Of the hetero cases, the vast majority are women - which implies to me that the men are engaging in needle sharing or are bisexual.
Here’s a table from the CDC that breaks down HIV exposure by source for 1999-2002.
My point being, while AIDS is a tragedy no matter what group is afflicted,it is simply incorrect to say that it is now or ever was primarily a heterosexual disease in the US.
June 7th, 2004 at 10:29 am
http://counterpunch.org/
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=17066
http://www.rall.com/rants.html
June 7th, 2004 at 10:36 am
Poli Sci 101
Last year, Megan McArdle proposed Jane’s First Law of Politics: The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane.
I propose a corollary to her law: The power of a current leader can be meas…
June 7th, 2004 at 10:53 am
I’m not sure what this has to do with the pathological jerks who continue to hate Reagan after all these years for his one-time failure to wave the magic presidential wand and make the AIDS virus go away. Still, for what it’s worth, the fact that AIDS disproportionally affects gays is not an historical accident. Anal sex causes bleeding. Conventional sex between otherwise healthy people does not. That distinction doesn’t seem to matter very much when it comes to spreading syphillis, gonorreah or herpes, but it does for the HIV virus, which can’t survive long on its own. The risk of a healthy gay man getting AIDS from an otherwise healthy, HIV+ gay man is extremely high. The risk of a healthy woman getting the same disease from an otherwise healthy straight man is relatively low, and the risk of her later passing it on to a healthy male is almost nonexistent. [Notice I said "almost." Yes, the inaptly named Magic Johnson managed to get the disease. No, his case was not typical. Few straight men even fantasize about having as many partners as he did, let alone actually have them. Even among the straight male horndog celebrities like Johnson who do, very few end up HIV+.]
That said, anyone intent on pushing the “Reagan would have made AIDS go away if straights got it too” meme would do well to consider that very little of what we know today about the AIDS virus was known back then. In the early 1980s, the only thing we knew for certain about the disease was that it had initially affected the gay community disproportionally. We had no reason to assume it continue to do so over time. Conventional wisdom was that straights could give each other AIDS just as easily as they pass around any other form of V.D., in which case a straight version of the AIDS epidemic was a year or two away, if that. Was Evil Ronnie trying to kill all us straights, too?
June 7th, 2004 at 11:38 am
The title of his blog says it all: useless! worthless! insipid!
He lives up to every word of that title.
We all expect civil humans not to denigrate someone at their funeral - or on the day they die.
Perhaps Mr Benedetto can come up with something to merit his inclusion in the “civil human being” class. Based on his recent post, “Lunacy”, it looks like it’ll be a long time coming.
June 7th, 2004 at 1:47 pm
“I’m not sure what this has to do with the pathological jerks who continue to hate Reagan after all these years for his one-time failure to wave the magic presidential wand and make the AIDS virus go away.”
Reagan never mentioned a growing national health threat for the first 7 years of the epidemic. I could give him the first two, but 7 years? And you can blame AIDS on gay sex if you wish, instead of say, the virus that causes AIDS, but I notice that you don’t have the same vicious rhetoric for smokers. They certainly participate in a known behavior that leads to disease and death. They even spread it around forcibly to unwilling victims by second-hand smoke. You can’t say the same for the AIDS virus. If you are going to turn AIDS into a moral issue, then you better start on an even playing field.
And BTW, I don’t hate Reagan now, and I didn’t hate him back then, but I’ll confess to a growing dislike for you, jerk.
June 7th, 2004 at 2:20 pm
If someone smokes and dies, it was their choice. If you have unprotected sex, you will get an STD. Were gays really ignorent of other STDs? Such diseases have been around for 1000s of years. The anti-Reagan homosexuals want their cake and to eat it too. Since Reagan was against this belief (he saw liberty and responsibility as a virtue) it shouldn’t be surprising that they hate him.
June 7th, 2004 at 2:46 pm
Sorry, Patrick, but contrary to Orwell, you can repeat a lie as many times as you want; it won’t turn that lie into truth. As to your “growing dislike” of me, I frankly couldn’t care less. Get your own damned blog. No one’s got a gun to your head forcing you to read mine.
June 8th, 2004 at 8:47 am
So I was off by two years. Big whoop. (The syndrome that came to be known as AIDS was identified in 1981- your article is wrong.)
The fact is that the only thing gay men are guilty of is being MEN.
Promiscuous straight guys who screw around are called “Studs”, and they also pass around STD’s, but you don’t see anyone condemming them the way you like to condemn gay men.
Of course, you also oppose gays getting married, which is one of the ways that society traditionally controls a guys promiscuous nature. You are quite the hypocrite.
June 8th, 2004 at 9:50 am
The difference between 5 and 7 is considerable, but the bigger point, which you (deliberately?) missed, is that every budget from 1984 on contained substantial funding for AIDS research. I don’t believe for a minute that the SOTU address in 1986 was the first time Reagan said anything publicly about AIDS; it’s just the first one I could find easily. To name only the most obvious example, if Reagan managed to go through the 1984 debates without mentioning AIDS, you have Walter Mondale to thank for that.
Look, if you would quit throwing around these baseless, inflammatory charges, and simply argue that Reagan could/should have acted more quickly/decisively than he did, you’d have a defensible argument. Instead, you chose simply to act like a jerk. Not nearly as big of a jerk as Michael Benedetto or Philip Hitchcock, mind you, but a jerk nonetheless. That you can act like that and still have the chutzpah to call me a jerk is rich, indeed. Your new, equally baseless claim that I get some sick pleasure out of condemning gay men is yet another example of who the real jerk is.
June 8th, 2004 at 11:22 am
I shall be very interested to hear the balanced, unspiteful comments from the Right when, in due course, either Clinton is tossed into time’s winged wastebasket. The difference, I anticipate, won’t be vociferous criticisms of their policies, but rants that will give new meaning to the phrase “ad hominem.”
June 8th, 2004 at 12:51 pm
Ever heard of “tu quoque?” It’s Latin for “Oh, yeah, and so’s your old man,” and about as convincing.
June 8th, 2004 at 2:14 pm
Jody-
I appreciate the stats, but I’ve read a great deal of lit that indicates rates are rising in heterosexuals (esp. teens)at a higher rate than the gay community. Alas, I cannot find the links to those articles at the moment.
Given that the gay (and I included gay women when I say “community”) community makes up approximately 10% of the population, I still think it likely that more hetero people are infected than gays. I failed to clarify this before, and I apologize.
June 8th, 2004 at 4:28 pm
Lachlan: you are probably correct that slightly more heteros are infected than gays, but only because of intravenous drug abusers. According to the NIH figures Jody cites, gay male sex accounts for 60% of all new HIV infections among males, while males account for 70% of all new infections. That means 42% of all new infections are caused by sex between gay males. Heterosexual sex, by contrast, accounts for only 33% of all new infections among both sexes (75% of the female 30%, plus 15% of the male 70%), despite the fact that straights outnumber gays by a margin of roughly 49 to 1. [Most recent studies indicate that gays account for approximately 1% of the population, some are a bit higher but none come anywhere close to supporting the 10% meme.]
Any way you look at it, less than 1% of the population (gay males) is getting more new infections that the other 99% (straights of both sexes, and lesbians combined). Short of comparing pregnancy statistics among men vs. women, figures just don’t get more lopsided than that.
June 8th, 2004 at 4:37 pm
“So’s your old man” was not my point. My point was that conservatives have got a lot of nerve complaining about attacks on Saint Ronald when most of those attacks have been based on his policies, not on his personality, which most of his detractors have said wasn’t all that bad. (I’m not sure if I agree; he showed a distinct lack of compassion both as governor and president.) Compare the continuous attacks on Clinton, then look up the definition of ad hominem. There’s a big difference.
June 8th, 2004 at 6:00 pm
If “so’s your old man” wasn’t your point, I have to wonder if you even had a point. There was no other reason to bring up the alleged sins of conservatives in a discussion about the bad behavior of certain liberals. Even if your hallucinations were accurate, it would be immaterial. That some conservatives might behave uncivilly under Circumstance X does not justify liberals behaving uncivilly under Circumstance Y. The only appropriate response is to condemn both acts, if and when they occur. And trust me, if I come across any right wing blogs gloating over a prominent liberal’s death, I will.
June 8th, 2004 at 6:28 pm
Hallucinations? Did you read the Weekly Spectator during the ’90s, or listen to Rush Limbaugh? Ever hear of Richard Mellon Scaife? Panic that the precious Nixon-Reagan conservative revolution might be overturned resulted in the most vicious, personality-based scandalmongering in American history (surpassing, amazingly, what the Federalists and the Republicans did to each other 200 years ago) and their lowering of the bar is something we’re all living with today.
Once again, my point was and is that people (including Mike Benedetto) have been criticizing Ronald Reagan for his ruinous policies, NOT for his personality. Yes, some of their rhetoric has been strong, but so has much of the recent rhetoric canonizing Reagan - call it an equal and oppoite reaction. I don’t see you criticizing some of the outlandish statements of what have been called in the last few days the hagiographers.
June 8th, 2004 at 7:04 pm
OK, Huntington, I think I see where you’re coming from. Once you cut out all the rhetorical mumbo jumbo about “ruinous” this and “revolution” that, we’re left with a huge double standard. In your view, liberals can spew all the hate they want at a conservative, even at a conservative who has been out of office for 15 years, has suffered a very nasty disease for 10, and who died less than a day before. As long as there is some ideological, policy based fig leaf (which may itself be grounded in a gross misrepresentation of what his actual policies were), that’s just dandy.
On the other hand, once a group of conservatives starts playing that “dissent” thing and protesting the policies of a sitting President, while he is President, well, that’s just going too far.
Last and least, there is nothing “equal and opposite” about saying overly nice things about an old man who has just died, on the one hand, vs. defaming him and spewing hate, on the other. Love and hatred may be opposite, but they sure as hell aren’t equal.
June 8th, 2004 at 9:11 pm
Truth be known, Reagan gets a worse rap than he deserves. He’s become a symbol of a larger moral failure at the time.
I suppose you could say I’m a survivor of those times. I’m 40 years old, and all my friends and partners died during my 20’s. Out of a circle of about 30 people, there are 3 left. But that wasn’t all of it. In the larger cities It wasn’t just the people you knew that were dying off, it was EVERYONE you knew. Your dentist, the barber, the fucking box-boy at the grocery store who used to flirt with you.
You stopped asking certain questions unless you were prepared for “the news”. Questions like “How is so-and-so?” or “Have you seen you-know-who?” became verboten with some people.
Everybody around you is dying off like the dinosaurs. So ya might say its a major life-changing experience.
But the funny thing is that it’s invisible. It doesn’t exist. It never happened. You don’t see it mentioned on the evening news. It ain’t in the paper. And no politician is sure as hell going to touch it with a ten-foot pole.
And yeah, leaders in the gay community had the same moral failure. They didn’t want to see it.
Gay and Lesbian people were used to being outcasts, but it had never been made so clear before just of how little value the rest of our fair country sees in us. Just how worthless most people thought our lives were.
So Reagan doesn’t bear the blame alone. He was silent, but so were the rest of you fucking assholes. Yeah, I got a chip on my shoulder. Too Bad.
You committed a morally reprehensible crime of neglect of your fellow man. You are supposed to help the sick. Regardless of what you think of their morals. And I’m not feeling charitable toward sinners today.
And now you are trying to rewrite history and make Reagan into a fucking member of ACT UP. No doubt so you can try and forget your own guilt, if you ever actually felt any.
Well guess what? You didn’t quite get to see the last of us. There’s still a few old geezers like me who are around and remember the truth. We remember because our dead friends won’t let us forget. And we are still angry and we can still kick your ass.
June 8th, 2004 at 11:35 pm
Xlrq, you just keep refusing to hear what I’m saying. Let me approach it from another angle: I feel bad for the Reagans and especially for the former President. That he had to suffer the long twilight of Alzheimer’s is incredibly tragic on a personal level. I’m not lying - I’ve had family with the same condition, and it’s hell for the sufferer and for those who love him.
However, that doesn’t excuse the current adulation surrounding his record as President. As a proud member of the Left, of course I believe his policies were ruinous (not sure how that word is “mumbo jumbo”; seems like a pretty straightforward adjective to me). Of course I believe the fact that he was so influential for so long, and that he is a hero to so many of today’s powerful neoconservatives, is appalling. So is the likelihood that the GOP seems poised to use his death to get votes for Bush that the latter is having trouble garnering for himself. As a public figure, Reagan’s record is open to criticism, and that’s all we’re doing.
Once again, the difference is between attacks on the man’s policies vs. the attacks on Clinton’s character that we saw in the “vast right-wing conspiracy” of the ’90s. Of course I had no objection to the Right criticizing Clinton’s policies; that’s what the Loyal Opposition is there for. But when it became apparent that most of Clinton’s policies were favored by most Americans, the slime I mentioned in my previous post spent millions dragging the Clintons through the mud, ruined lives, and staged that ridiculous circus of an impeachment, and for what? Clinton left office more popular than ever, and his wife was elected to the Senate.
Having said all that, I’ll now turn around and admit that, yes, some of the attacks on Reagan cross the line between his policies and his personality. It’s difficult to separate the two when you really care about politics, government, and what drives politicians to do what they do. Mike has already said his Hitler comment may have been a little over the top, and I tend to agree. But when you’re talking about replacing FDR on the dime, Hamilton on the 20, and putting Reagan on Mt. Rushmore, I think some people who fear that this kind of mass hysteria will affect the current election have a right to their own hyperbole. Reagan’s legacy is still being played out; it’s serious business, and participation in it belongs to all Americans, not just his family or his supporters.
June 9th, 2004 at 7:11 am
Comparing any U.S. President to Hitler is not “a bit over the top,” it’s far out of bounds. It has nothing to do with debating whether or not to put Reagan on our currency, Mt. Rushmore, etc. Those decisions aren’t going to be made between now and Friday, anyway. As to the November election, I think it’s way too far off to be benefitted significantly from Reagan’s death. However, feel free to prove me wrong by continuing to make excuses for those who gloat over his death. By keeping the Ted Rall contingent on the front page, you’ll end up giving Kerry with two bad choices: (1) risk guilt by association, or (2) tell a significant subset of his own base to fuck off.
Once again, you draw a left/right distinction that doesn’t pass the sneer test. Some of Clinton’s policies were popular, others weren’t. Ditto for Reagan, but to a much greater degree. Yet, you defend one and condemn the other, for no reason other than crass partisanship. I can’t wait to hear you explain in greater detail whose lives you think were “ruined” by Rush Limbaugh, the American Spectator, or any other part of the leftist hallucination that is the “vast right wing conspiracy.” [Unless, of course, you define VRWC as broadly as Hillary Clinton did when she coined the term to refer to anyone who thought there really was a stained dress.]
Last and least, if you think it’s ridiculous to impeach a President for perjury and suburning the same, I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree. Good luck passing your moral character examination. I hear they don’t take too kindly to the idea that perjury is no big deal.
June 10th, 2004 at 10:11 am
From http://www.andrewsullivan.com:
Sorry to continue about this, but I just got sent the following transcript of a press conference by Larry Speakes, presidential spokesman, on October 15, 1982. It speaks for itself:
Q: Larry, does the President have any reaction to the announcement from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, that AIDS is now an epidemic and have over 600 cases?
MR. SPEAKES: What’s AIDS?
Q: Over a third of them have died. It’s known as “gay plague.” (Laughter.) No, it is. I mean it’s a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died. And I wondered if the President is aware of it?
MR. SPEAKES: I don’t have it. Do you? (Laughter.)
Q: No, I don’t.
MR. SPEAKES: You didn’t answer my question.
Q: Well, I just wondered, does the President …
MR. SPEAKES: How do you know? (Laughter.)
Q: In other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke?
MR. SPEAKES: No, I don’t know anything about it, Lester.
Q: Does the President, does anyone in the White House know about this epidemic, Larry?
MR. SPEAKES: I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s been any …
Q: Nobody knows?
MR. SPEAKES: There has been no personal experience here, Lester.
Q: No, I mean, I thought you were keeping …
MR. SPEAKES: I checked thoroughly with Dr. Ruge this morning and he’s had no - (laughter) - no patients suffering from AIDS or whatever it is.
Q: The President doesn’t have gay plague, is that what you’re saying or what?
MR. SPEAKES: No, I didn’t say that.
Q: Didn’t say that?
MR. SPEAKES: I thought I heard you on the State Department over there. Why didn’t you stay there? (Laughter.)
Q: Because I love you Larry, that’s why (Laughter.)
MR. SPEAKES: Oh I see. Just don’t put it in those terms, Lester. (Laughter.)
Q: Oh, I retract that.
MR. SPEAKES: I hope so.
Q: It’s too late.
June 10th, 2004 at 12:21 pm
“What’s AIDS?” would be an unforgivably stupid question for anyone to ask today. It was quite different (though embarassing nonetheless) for a spokesman of the President not to have heard of it in October of 1982, when there were only 600 known cases and the name “AIDS” had only been in common use for a couple of months.
As bad as this exchange was, it doesn’t exactly bolster your claim that Reagan made it through five years of his presidency without mentioning AIDS publicly. Then again, neither does the fact that you originally claimed seven years, until confronted with a specific example from 1986.
June 10th, 2004 at 1:07 pm
Well if your own source is to be believed, then September 17th, 1985 was the first time AIDS was mentioned by Reagan.
“On September 17th, President Reagan publicly mentioned AIDS for the first time, when he was asked about AIDS funding at a press conference. At the same press conference he was also asked a question whether he would send his children if they were younger to school with a child who has AIDS.”
Also, according to your source, the number of reported AIDS cases in the US had reached 15,948.
If the majority of the AIDS victims had been surburban housewives, do you think it would have come up sooner? Of course the subject of AIDS came up in reference to Ryan White, an “innocent” victim. Apparently the death of hundreds, or even thousands of gay men by that point wasn’t worth mentioning.
Reagan didn’t even bring up the topic himself, until he was asked about it during a press conference.
This was also the year that Ryan White was barred from school after being diagnosed with AIDS. It was quite well known by that time that it was a sexually transmitted disease. But your fearless leader says;
“It is true that some medical sources had said that this cannot be communicated in any way other than the ones we already know and which would not involve a child being in the school. And yet medicine has not come forth unequivocally and said, ‘This we know for a fact, that it is safe.” And until they do, I think we just have to do the best we can with this problem. I can understand both sides of it.”
How is that for a display of leadership qualities? And have you noticed that there is a little 3-letter word missing from all his exchanges? G-a-y? Like our current President, he was too cowardly to even say the word in public for fear of offending his voting base of Christian zealots.
http://www.avert.org/his81_86.htm
June 10th, 2004 at 1:54 pm
The fact that AIDS was/is a sexually trasmitted disease does not mean anyone could be 100% certain it couldn’t be spread any other way. Thus, I fail to see why you think it reflects poor leadership, as opposed to common sense, to acknowledge that an issue was thornier at the time than it would be based on what is known today. It’s also funny how one minute Reagan was too cavalier about AIDS, the next, he’s an alarmist. IMO, that basic mentality, AIDS as a “civil rights disease,” contributed a lot more to the spread of AIDS than anything any elected officials did or didn’t do.
As to Reagan not mentioning gayness in connection with Ryan White’s difficult case, might that have been because Ryan White’s case had nothing to do with gayness?
June 10th, 2004 at 2:49 pm
“Thus, I fail to see why you think it reflects poor leadership, as opposed to common sense, to acknowledge that an issue was thornier at the time than it would be based on what is known today.”
And exactly how many cases of schoolyard transmission of HIV have there been?
“By the end of the year(1983) the number of AIDS cases in the USA had risen to 3,064 and of these 1292 had died.”
The majority of people who had died of AIDS prior to his remarks were gay men. Don’t you think it would be at least logical to bring that into the context of his response to the reporters questions?
But even regarding Ryan White he misses the mark.
At a time when HIV children were being burned out of their homes, do you think an ambiguous statement like his was acceptable? Could he at least have added “either way, it’s wrong to discriminate against the sick”? He says he’s for “both sides” but fails to mention the other side!
Regarding the use of the word “gay”, if you read your own source more carefully, you would see that there were two separate questions from the press. The Ryan White speech was a 2nd, entirely separate question.
I repeat:
If the majority of the AIDS victims had been surburban housewives, do you think it would have come up sooner?
” When it began turning up in children and transfusion recipients, that was a turning point in terms of public perception. Up until then it was entirely a gay epidemic, and it was easy for the average person to say ‘So what?’ Now everyone could relate.”
- Harold Jaffe of the CDC for newsweek -34 (1983)
Reagan and the society at the time were perfectly willing to ignore dying gay men with AIDS. It’s a moral failure that cannot be wriggled around. You complain that AIDS was made into a “civil rights” but you fail to posit an alternative. It’s was only after gay men started getting in peoples faces that serious changes began. Many of the “civil rights” groups you would no doubt complain of such as ACT UP, GMHC, APLA, came about precisely because of the neglect of the disease by government and society at large.
There were no service organizations to take care of the sick, no prevention resources. A gay organization had to be formed even to provide care to HIV babies because the majority of straights did not want to become involved.
Instead of quibbling with me over when Reagan first uttered AIDS. Why don’t you go back to your AIDS information source and read the history it provides from the beginning? I’ts obvious you haven’t done this.
June 10th, 2004 at 3:29 pm
But here we are in another transcript two years later on December 11, 1984, with the same questioner:
Q: An estimated 300,000 people have been exposed to AIDS, which can be transmitted through saliva. Will the President, as Commander-in-Chief, take steps to protect Armed Forces food and medical services from AIDS patients or those who run the risk of spreading AIDS in the same manner that they forbid typhoid fever people from being involved in the health or food services?
MR. SPEAKES: I don’t know.
Q: Could you — Is the President concerned about this subject, Larry —
MR. SPEAKES: I haven’t heard him express–
Q: –that seems to have evoked so much jocular–
MR. SPEAKES: –concern.
Q: –reaction here? I — you know —
Q: It isn’t only the jocks, Lester.
Q: Has he sworn off water faucets–
Q: No, but, I mean, is he going to do anything, Larry?
MR. SPEAKES: Lester, I have not heard him express anything on it. Sorry.
Q: You mean he has no — expressed no opinion about this epidemic?
MR. SPEAKES: No, but I must confess I haven’t asked him about it. (Laughter.)
Q: Would you ask him Larry?
MR. SPEAKES: Have you been checked? (Laughter.)
June 10th, 2004 at 3:50 pm
None that I am aware of. You know that they say about 20-20 hindsight.
Possibly. If a comparable proportion of suburban housewives had become infected, definitely.
I’m not sure what you mean by “burned out of their homes,” but I think it’s pretty clear what “both sides” are. I do think it’s a safe bet that if AIDS did not affect gays disproportionally, it wouldn’t have had the “civil rights” baggage associated with it, and local governments might have been given more leeway to contain it. Whether such efforts would have succeeded or failed is pure conjecture.
I will grant you this much about Reagan: if the two transcripts you quoted are legit, he’s definitely guilty of hiring an idiot for a spokesman.
June 10th, 2004 at 8:51 pm
The very resources you quote clearly show that the Reagan administration was morally deficient in it’s response to the AIDS crisis. Yet you fail to conceed this.
You wish to blame gay people for “politisizing” the epidemic, yet you fail to agknowledge that that was exactly what was done by the Reagan administration.
Individual Health Depts wanted to do many things that would slow the spread of AIDS, such as clean needle distribution & sex education. They were not stopped by the politcal maneuvering of gay people, but by the machinations of the Radical Right and the Reagan administration.
In a 5 minute Google search I come up with multitudes of factual documents (even from government archives!)that outline in detail the massive failure of the Reagan administration’s handling of the AIDS crisis.
And you can only produce sources that confirm everything that I have said.
Incidentally, the reason I thought that it was 7 years into the AIDS epidemic instead of 5 is because Reagan’s first speech about AIDS as part of a policy speech, not an off-the-cuff remark, was in his speech in 1987.
Between June 1981 and May 1982, the CDC spent less than $1 million on AIDS, but $9 million on Legionnaire’s Disease. At that point over 1,000 of the 2,000 AIDS cases reported resulted in death; there were fewer than 50 deaths from Legionnaire’s Disease. Yet you fail to admit that the initial failure to address AIDS was because of prejudice against homosexuals.
Here are some remarks former Surgeon General Dr. Everett Koop in a speech given on the 20 anniversary of the beginning of the AIDS crisis.
You can find the entire speech here.
http://www.kaisernetwork.org/health_cast/uploaded_files/morningtrns2.pdf
DR. C. EVERETT KOOP:
By August of that same year, (1981) we learned from CDC that there had been 108 cases reported of HIV and 43 of those had already died. I was not yet the Surgeon General and all through that summer of `81, I was preoccupied by my long struggle for confirmation. But I certainly did realize if ever there was a challenge for a Surgeon General, it was a disease we called AIDS/HIV. But for some reason, due to intradepartmental politics that I still cannot truly understand or explain to you, I was cut off from AIDS discussions and statements over the next five years. But I did have a very definite impression about what was going on on Pennsylvania Avenue. Domestic policy folks in the White House isolated Ronald Reagan from the whole subject of AIDS. And because transmission of AIDS was understood primarily in the homosexual population and in those who abused intravenous drugs, the advisors to the President, took the stand, they are only getting what they justly deserve.
And the domestic policy people, as well as the majority of the President’s cabinet, did not see any need to come to grips with AIDS, or indeed to have a governmental policy towards this disease. And these combined attitudes did nothing to dampen. Indeed, they very–very well may have aided and embedded the hatred of homosexuals in this country, the discrimination against innocent school children like Ryan White, and the acts of arson on the homes of hapless children with hemophilia, such as the Ray Children.
(In Florida the Ray children were forced to flee their community after they were burned out of their home)
You can also get an overview of the first 20 Years of AIDS Legislation and Policy from the Kaiser foundation at the link below.
It’s also pretty damming.
http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_index.cfm?hint=1&DR_ID=5036
Here is a timeline of AIDS from the NIH.
http://aidshistory.nih.gov/timeline/index.html
Here’s a little note regarding that Reagan Biography that you’all were astir about awhile back.
“The most memorable Reagan AIDS moment was at the 1986 centenary rededication of the Statue of Liberty. The Reagan’s were there sitting next to the French Prime Minister and his wife, Francois and Danielle Mitterrand. Bob Hope was on stage entertaining the all-star audience. In the middle of a series of one-liners, Hope quipped, “I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS, but she doesn’t know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy.” As the television camera panned the audience, the Mitterrands looked appalled. The Reagans were laughing. By the end of 1989, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States—more then 70,000 of them had died.”
http://www.zmag.org/ZMagSite/Jan2004/bronskipr0104.html
The facts are that I’m right, your wrong, and you are too chickenshit to admit it.
June 10th, 2004 at 10:27 pm
Wrong. There are a lot of facts involved here, but the most relevant one is that you have proved, not once but repeatedly, that you are either unwilling or perhaps unable to discuss this issue without acting like a self-righteous jerk.
You think I can’t admit when I’ve been wrong? Watch me. With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, I now recognize that when you posted this asshole comment, I was very, very wrong to let it go rather than to immediately demand that you either retract it or be banned from this site. Instead, I let it go, only to have you turn around and invent baseless charges that I somehow enjoy condemning gay people. That time I did call you on it, but neglected to mention that you were quickly wearing out your welcome. Soon after that you went completely off the deep end, even to the point of making thinly veiled criminal threats. I briefly considered banning you at that point, but again, just like Reagan on AIDS, Carter on Iran, and Clinton on al-Qaeda, I failed to act as quickly and decisively as I might have. So I got this last post instead.
Obviously, I made a huge mistake in failing to politely but firmly request that you fuck off quite some time ago. Instead, I’m just getting around to that now. For that I apologize. Not to you, obviously, but to anyone else who may have had the misfortune of observing this pointless exchange.
Fact of the matter is, I have no dog in this fight, no old guilt to cover up, nothing. I wasn’t even old enough to vote in 1980 or 1984, and if I had been, it would have been for Carter and Mondale, respectively. I’ve already acknowledged that Reagan probably could have and should have acted more swiftly and more decisively on this issue than he did. I remain open to any other provable facts, or even credible allegations, that could potentially prove more damning than that. I’m just not open to hearing them from you. You’ve had too many second chances already. Goodbye.
June 13th, 2004 at 3:53 pm
You’ve proven yourself to be a complete asshole in everything you’ve said thus far.
You’re ignorant, a totally hateful rageoholic, and quite frankly, if there’s any justice in this world, I hope you and Reagan will enjoy your time together in hell.
June 13th, 2004 at 8:55 pm
My, aren’t we a ray of fucking sunshine?
July 4th, 2004 at 5:18 am
Mike ,I still love you .
Barbara
July 4th, 2004 at 5:26 am
Mike,
Where are you ? I miss you . It would be nice to hear from you .
Barbara
July 7th, 2004 at 11:14 pm
Hey Mike,
I love to sleeping with you.
Barbara
July 7th, 2004 at 11:18 pm
:whip::whip::whip:
July 17th, 2004 at 6:33 am
Mike,
Ballet is my life ,but you are my love.
barbara
July 21st, 2004 at 8:23 am
Mike,
I don’t want to be alone. Please spend the the rest of your life with me. Please write.
I need you.
Barbara
July 25th, 2004 at 6:54 am
Mike,
Hey, Do you know?I still have much ink in my pen.
I love you.
Barbara