Reagan and AIDS - or the moronic rantings of Elton John

I know everyone is clamoring for my note to American Airlines. It is coming - rest assured. But this story slipped into my email inbox and I felt the need to respond.

The excellent "Left Coast Report" is a weekly email that I get and it is (as described by its author James Hirsen) as a "Political Look at Hollywood". It is great reading albeit sad when the reader realizes how loony Hollywood and major actors really are. There are some times when actors are cited that actually stand out from the crowd of leftist sheep but these are few and far between.

In the most recent email post entitled "Elton John Plays Oprah for Hillary", Hirsen notes that:

John expressed his fondness for the New York Senator and gushed, “There is no one more qualified to lead America.”...

John apparently felt compelled to invoke the name of the late great Ronald Reagan, telling the audience that his next song, “The Ballad of the Boy in the Red Shoes,” was about a child who was dying from AIDS.

“The Reagan administration did nothing to help people with AIDS, and that is a disgrace,” John said.

So I had to research this a little as the idea that Reagan didn't care about AIDS is a leftist fantasy. Thankfully National Review comes to the rescue again. Deroy Murdock writing in 2003 in National Review quotes Ed Meese (Reagan's Attorney General) as saying:

"I can remember numerous sessions of the domestic-policy council where the surgeon general provided information to us, and the questions were not whether the federal government would get involved, but what would be the best way. There was support for research through the NIH. There also were questions about the extent to which public warnings should be sent out. It was a question of how the public would respond to fairly explicit warnings about fairly explicit things. Ultimately, warnings were sent out."

Further in the article Murdock quotes a former speech writer of Reagan's, Peter Robinson regarding AIDS funding with this remark: "... every Reagan budget contained a large sum of money specifically earmarked for AIDS,". Murdock actually has a chart that shows the growth of Government Spending on AIDS from $8 Million in 1982 to $2,322 Million in 1989 for a total of $5,727 Million. How can someone say that the Government turned its back on AIDS? I meant for intellectually honest people that is.

The article also addresses the myth that Reagan didn't talk about AIDS in public until 1987 (not true) and the myth that Reagan was a homophobe (in Hollywood?). I will not quote Murdock's work in total here. Instead offer the reader to go to National Review and read the article for themselves.

Elton John should stop lecturing us about our country and just shut up and sing. I think the "Rocket Man" has had too many "Candles in the Wind" - if you know what I mean.

Actually - I don't either. Maybe I should blame Reagan.

OS

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