Posted on 12/09/2003 11:10:26 PM PST by nickcarraway
"On the eve of World War II," says the Dec. 7 cover of Parade magazine, "the U.S. government turned away the S.S. St. Louis, a ship carrying 937 men, women, and children fleeing the Nazis." The "U.S. government" here mainly means Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He turned them away. Pleas were made to Roosevelt to save the passengers; he ignored them. And because of it hundreds of people lost their lives in the concentration camps of Europe.
Yet FDR is a great president, we are told. You don't often hear liberals accuse him of callousness. They reserve that charge for Ronald Reagan. It still outrages them that Reagan didn't singlehandedly stop the AIDS virus.
"More Americans died of AIDS during Ronald Reagan's presidency than in all of this nation's wars in the last 30 years," writes Hillary Rosen in Daily Variety. "...We will never know how many of these deaths could have been prevented if Reagan had been the moral leader [Reagan] revisionists would have him be."
Yes, AIDS spread because of a failure of moral leadership. But not Reagan's. It is not that he didn't offer a solution to the crisis. He offered the only proven solution to the AIDS crisis -- abstinence; Rosen and her friends simply didn't like his solution. That's not Reagan's failure of moral leadership. It is theirs.
Given Rosen's rhetoric, one would think Reagan personally spread the virus. He didn't spread it; those who ignored his common-sense morality did. Rosen wants candor about the Reagan legacy. This is rich given the total lack of candor and sense of moral responsibility from liberals like her who rationalize and justify the conduct of those who actually spread the disease. When will we get some candor about that?
"Reagan and his political cronies, the same ones who are now crying foul, aided and promoted the ignorance [about AIDS]. The CDC [Centers for Disease Control] knew how to alert the public about health risk," writes Rosen. This also is a rich claim given that the CDC was discouraged from speaking plainly about the disease due to politically correct pressure from Rosen's friends. As it has been widely documented, AIDS was not treated like other diseases (where hard-headed public health actions are deployed) for ideological reasons. Again, still no candor from the left about that.
To say that Reagan didn't address the crisis is a lie. He just didn't address it in the approved PC manner of his accusers, frauds who demand moral accountability from everyone except themselves.
If the left wants to talk about real presidential omissions of duty, they could start with FDR. The S.S. St. Louis incident illustrates what a cynical, immoral operator he could be.
He turned away Jewish passengers fleeing Hitler for reasons of pure base politics. The boat had landed first in Cuba, but hack Cuban political officials kicked them off the island. It then headed to Florida. "Urgent cables were sent to every level of the U.S. government, including two personal appeals to President Franklin D. Roosevelt," Lyric Wallwork Winik writes in Parade. "He never replied. Instead, Coast Guard boats patrolled to prevent anyone from swimming to shore." (Perhaps a precedent the Elian Gonzalez-snatching Reno Justice Department had studied.)
Even Conrad Black, in his admiring biography of FDR, has to acknowledge that FDR's treatment of Jewish refugees was an "unedifying" episode of his presidency. "There were many editorials asking Roosevelt to be merciful to these unfortunates. He didn't reply to any of it. Concerned that Hitler's next ploy would be to try and inundate the United States with his indigent and terrified victims, Roosevelt did not alter the challenging means test that Hoover had decreed for immigration candidates, screening out anyone who it seemed could become a welfare case in the United States," he writes.
Turning his back on thousands of European Jews (FDR maintained strict immigration controls after the incident), even though he knew that Hitler had every intention of killing them, FDR presaged his disgraceful diplomacy at Yalta. It is no wonder that a president who couldn't be bothered to save a boatful of Jewish refugees had no problem blithely handing the peoples of Eastern Europe over to Joseph Stalin.
It would take Reagan to undo FDR's folly at Yalta. That the left who love FDR castigate Reagan for not rescuing "victims" shows the depth of their perverse historical memory.
George Neumayr is managing editor of The American Spectator.
AIDS is by and large a behavior related disease. Was Reagan supposed to patrol gays bars nightly and send the police into every gay household to prevent them from having sex? These people do not think when they open their mouths.
Nobody had the courage to do it
Yes, AIDS spread because of a failure of moral leadership. But not Reagan's. It is not that he didn't offer a solution to the crisis. He offered the only proven solution to the AIDS crisis -- abstinence; Rosen and her friends simply didn't like his solution. That's not Reagan's failure of moral leadership. It is theirs.
This obsession the likes of Hillary Rosen have with blaming Reagan for AIDS would qualify as dementia if it wasn't their conscious choice not to recognize the truth. There isn't a thing Reagan could have done to contain the AIDS epidemic -- that is, unless he had chosen the heretofore most effective path: the quarantine of homosexuals with the disease, as occurred in Castro's Cuba. That would have gotten the job done, but they would have instead whined and cried about their "right" to fornicate promiscuously and anonymously without apology.
Some twenty years hence, it's laugh-out-loud funny how Rosen can say that Reagan wasn't a moral leader because he didn't choose to throw money at a disease spread by immorality. And while advances in treatment of HIV has slowed down the rate of AIDS, here in my hometown of Sin Freaksicko, the syphilis rate is skyrocketing as if the "victims" didn't know how to protect themselves.
One thing that Neumayr should have mentioned is that Bill Clinton -- who said the word "AIDS" in public and gave a lot of token attention to the fight against it -- is the first and so far only President to put himself at risk of contracting it.
On the other hand, the intensive medical studies of AIDS, although they haven't cured it, have revealed enormously valuable information about viruses generally and led to medical breakthroughs for treating other kinds of infections.
Reagan spent more money on AIDS than either heart disease or cancer. The deaths from heart disease and cancer dwarf the deaths from AIDS.
But I agree that the majority of the victims of AIDS have no one but themselves to blame.
The human race has learned--over long centuries and millions of deaths--how to deal with contagious venereal diseases. Quarrantine and contact tracing.
For example: my father was a dermatologist in Baltimore. Occasionally he saw a case of syphillis or gonorrhea. The public health laws of Maryland (and I presume most other states) required him to "restrain the patient" (i.e., prevent his departure from the premises) and contact the Health Dept. They would dispatch an investigator, who would interrogate the patient: "Who have you been with?..."
Then he'd go to all those people and ask them the same. Eventually you treat and quarrantine enough so that the outbreak subsides.
Since there is no "cure" for AIDS, I tend to favor Bill Buckley's suggestion that a "Biohazard" logo be tattooed on the rump of everyone diagnosed. Sort of "truth in advertising", if you get my drift...
As long as the mouthpieces for AIDS prevent contact tracing and quarrantine, AIDS will continue to spread. It is really quite simple.
--Boris
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