Damn Sullivan

If you haven't been already, and haven't eaten recently, go read Andrew Sullivan's running love fest on Reagan. How an HIV-positive gay man can slather over a president who never mentioned the word AIDS in office as the epidemic ravaged the gay community and abetted the rise of the anti-gay bigots to the national stage where they now want to amend the Constitution in order to enforce discrimination is way, way beyond me. I'm not saying Andrew has to condemn him to hell or anything--he's allowed a sober assessment as much as the next guy, but come on. You don't have to think Reagan wanted homosexuals to get the plague to understand that Ronald Reagan being president when he was was a very, very bad thing for gay people in the United States.

That said, he outdoes himself in this post (courtesy Atrios), where he burns Arthur Schlesinger for not believing the Soviet Union was "evil" because Schlesinger thought the Soviet economic system was doing well in 1982. This is some patently absurd bullcrap. Schlesinger has done more to speak out against facism and communism than almost any public intellectual over the past half century (see his eloquent and exceptionally enjoyable autobiography ). Only he did it smart. That's a lot more than one can say for Sullivan's "courageous fight for freedom," a smug enterprise which has probably cost the U.S. its legitimacy as a force for good in the world for a long time to come. For what you ask? Only Sullivan and his co-hawks' precious vanity as far as I can tell.