Politics Hillary Clinton Lauds Reagans on AIDS. A Backlash

Discussion in 'Blazers OT Forum' started by Denny Crane, Mar 12, 2016.

  1. Denny Crane

    Denny Crane It's not even loaded! Staff Member Administrator

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    http://www.nytimes.com/politics/fir...nton-lauds-reagans-on-aids-a-backlash-erupts/

    But on Friday, Hillary Clinton praised Mrs. Reagan as a force in confronting another disease: H.I.V./AIDS, which was killing alarming numbers of gay men and others during Ronald Reagan’s two terms.

    “It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about H.I.V./AIDS back in the 1980s,” Mrs. Clinton, who was attending Mrs. Reagan’s funeral in Simi Valley, Calif., told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “And because of both President and Mrs. Reagan – in particular, Mrs. Reagan – we started a national conversation, when before nobody would talk about it. Nobody wanted anything to do with it.”

    The problem with Mrs. Clinton’s compliment: It was the Reagans who wanted nothing to do with the disease at the time.

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first identified the disease in 1981, but Mr. Reagan, despite desperate calls for action and thousands of deaths, did not mention H.I.V. or AIDS publicly until 1985 and did not give a speech about the disease until 1987, when an estimated 40,000 people had already died of the disease and roughly 36,000 more had given a diagnosis.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_policy_of_the_Ronald_Reagan_administration#Response_to_AIDS

    Reagan prevented his Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, from speaking out about the AIDS epidemic.[87] When in 1986 Reagan was highly encouraged by many other public officials to authorize Koop to issue a report on the epidemic, he expected it to be in line with conservative policies; instead, Koop's Surgeon General's Report on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome greatly emphasized the importance of a comprehensive AIDS education strategy, including widespread distribution of condoms, and rejected mandatory testing. This approach brought Koop into conflict with other administration officials such as Education Secretary William Bennett. In 1988, Koop took the unprecedented action of mailing AIDS information to every U.S. household. This information included the use of condoms as the decisive defense against contracting the disease.

    Social action groups such as ACT UP worked to raise awareness of the AIDS problem. Because of ACT UP, in 1987, Reagan responded by appointing the Watkins Commission on AIDS, which was succeeded by a permanent advisory council.

    Supporters of Reagan past and present have pointed out the fact that he declared in the aforementioned September 1985 press conference that he wanted from Congress massive government research effort against AIDS similar to one President Nixon had oversaw against cancer. Reagan said, "It's been one of the top priorities with us, and over the last 4 years, and including what we have in the budget for '86, it will amount to over a half a billion dollars that we have provided for research on AIDS in addition to what I'm sure other medical groups are doing." He also remarked, "Yes, there's no question about the seriousness of this and the need to find an answer." Annual AIDS related funding was $8 million in 1983, 2 years after he took office, and was $1.6 billion in 1988, an increase of over 1000 percent.[88][89][90]
     
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  2. dviss1

    dviss1 Emcee Referee

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    Keep hammering that bitch! I want to see her go down in flames!
     
  3. Denny Crane

    Denny Crane It's not even loaded! Staff Member Administrator

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    It's hard to square "wanted nothing to do with AIDS" with the massive increase in government funding of AIDS research.

    AIDS was seen by many, early on, as a disease that might infect everyone and kill off the entire human race.

    It is sad that 40,000 lost their lives by 1984, but in perspective, there are 500,000+ cancer deaths per year. Or 100,000 times more likely to kill than AIDS.

    Yet the massive increases in AIDS research funding cannot be denied. It is worth more than empty words and promises.

    [​IMG]


    [​IMG]
     
  4. dviss1

    dviss1 Emcee Referee

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    Wow Reagan..... I completely forgot about this one... Deplorable...
     
  5. dviss1

    dviss1 Emcee Referee

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    That's not true at all.

    It was originally called G.R.I.D.S. (Gay Related Immunodeficiency Disease) It was seen as a disease that only affected gay people. And the fact that Reagan barely did anything about it until 85' ish makes AIDS his Katrina.
     
  6. Denny Crane

    Denny Crane It's not even loaded! Staff Member Administrator

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    Not deplorable. He spent billions on AIDS research, and as the disease became more widely spread, he spent significantly more.

    1980 - 31 deaths, including all prior years
    1981 - 234 deaths
    1982 - 853 deaths
    1983 - 2304 deaths
    1984 - 4201 deaths

    Look at the funding graph.

    [​IMG]
     
  7. Denny Crane

    Denny Crane It's not even loaded! Staff Member Administrator

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    He did more than you suggest. Look at the funding.

    He spent massive dollars on research for a disease that killed hundreds a year. Near $6b in total.

    Looks like he took it quite seriously.


    Reagan said, "It's been one of the top priorities with us, and over the last 4 years, and including what we have in the budget for '86, it will amount to over a half a billion dollars that we have provided for research on AIDS in addition to what I'm sure other medical groups are doing." He also remarked, "Yes, there's no question about the seriousness of this and the need to find an answer." Annual AIDS related funding was $8 million in 1983, 2 years after he took office, and was $1.6 billion in 1988, an increase of over 1000 percent.[88][89][90]
     
  8. dviss1

    dviss1 Emcee Referee

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    The millions that he spent year were drops in the bucket compared to our budget. He basically didn't do shit till almost 87 ish. And said no words about it until 85. But people will defend him with their lives...
     
  9. dviss1

    dviss1 Emcee Referee

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    Yeah from 82 to 84 the deaths almost quintupled because he wasn't doing shit.
     
  10. dviss1

    dviss1 Emcee Referee

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    And I swear people... Stop posting Wikipedia links like they're a good source.
     
  11. dviss1

    dviss1 Emcee Referee

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    Aren't your death numbers off? The OP says 40K by 87. There must have been massive numbers of deaths between 84- 87.
     
  12. Denny Crane

    Denny Crane It's not even loaded! Staff Member Administrator

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    Wikipedia is a fine source.

    http://fumento.com/aids/heterodoxy.html

    Certainly Shilts’s book had plenty of vitriol for the Reagan administration, but then it was full of vitriol for everybody. Shilts was an angry young man with a machine gun that swept 360 degrees. The movie knocked out about half that range. Token shots fired over the heads of homosexual activists, bathhouses, and the San Francisco health department, allow the film’s full fury to be aimed at the president, Robert Gallo, and blood bank owners.

    Thus, the movie has AIDS "poster boy" Bobbi Campbell making an impassioned plea at a public meeting, asking, "If the gay community doesn’t starting raising hell, do you think the Reagan administration is going to do a damned thing?" But the book tells us that after Campbell discovered that what he had was infectious he continued to go to the bathhouses, albeit with the dubious insistence that he didn’t engage in sex. Thus we find that in reality a man blaming the Reagan administration for the spread of a disease was actually spreading it himself. I have encountered a similar phenomenon, as when homosexual writer Michelangelo Signorile blasted me in the most vicious of terms as a provider of dangerous information even as the magazine he wrote those words for ran ads for male prostitutes.

    ...

    Yes, in retrospect the epidemic got far less attention and funding early on than it should have gotten. And yes, part of this may have been that it was predominantly a disease of those who, at that time, had little political clout and in general received little sympathy. But a far better explanation lies in the nature of the beast. With most diseases, the number of cases you see approximates the number of victims. In the early years of the epidemic nobody had any idea that for every case identified there were thousands waiting to incubate. Had someone informed President Reagan not that there were a few hundred people suffering a sometimes terminal illness but that there were hundreds of thousands suffering an almost always fatal answer, his administration’s response may have been quite different.

    Further, even in 1993 there is nothing even approaching a cure for the disease despite massive AIDS research funding for the past half decade, no research funding early on could have made much of a difference. All the king’s money could not bring back those unfortunate hundreds of thousands. What is true is that many persons have been infected in the time since the modes of AIDS transmission were established. Since the disease is spread through very specific behaviors, its spread should be reducible through programs aimed at reducing those behaviors. Yet, since 1987 the federal government has joined with the organized homosexual groups and an assortment of other strange bedfellows including condom manufacturers, population control groups, and some Christian groups, to target AIDS messages at that part of the population least at risk of getting the disease — middle-class heterosexuals, children, women, and persons in rural areas.
     
  13. Denny Crane

    Denny Crane It's not even loaded! Staff Member Administrator

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    No, the numbers are not wrong.

    The death toll doubled year over year, as did the research funding.

    I stopped at 1984, because in Feb 1985, Reagan first spoke out publicly about AIDS.
     
  14. dviss1

    dviss1 Emcee Referee

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    He said something publicly... Whoop whoop... He didn't give a speech about it until three years later. The millions he gave toward research where drops in the bucket. You're defending him like you defended George Bush in Africa. Both of them did a horrible job on AIDS and should not be commended. Nothing you can tell me or show me will sway me. I'm really done with this argument now.
     
  15. Denny Crane

    Denny Crane It's not even loaded! Staff Member Administrator

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    You are not in command of the facts.

    http://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/18/us/reagan-defends-financing-for-aids.html

    REAGAN DEFENDS FINANCING FOR AIDS

    Published: September 18, 1985

    WASHINGTON, Sept. 17— President Reagan, who has been accused of public indifference to the AIDS crisis by groups representing victims of the deadly disease, said last night that his Administration was already making a ''vital contribution'' to research on the disease within the limits imposed by ''budgetary restraints.''

    Mr. Reagan was asked at his news conference if he could support ''a massive Government research program against AIDS like the program that President Nixon launched against cancer,'' in which Mr. Nixon called in 1971 for a ''total national commitment'' to ''conquering this dread disease.'' Mr. Reagan said that he had been supporting research into AIDS, acquired immune deficiency sydrome, for the last four years and that the effort was a ''top priority'' for the Administration.

    The President also expressed sympathy for both sides in the controversy over whether children suffering from AIDS should be permitted to attend school with healthy children.

    His remarks appeared to be the first time he has publicly addressed the issue of the lethal disease that has claimed thousands of victims, primarily among male homosexuals, intravenous drug addicts and hemophilliacs whose condition requires frequent blood transfusions. Although the Department of Health and Human Services has declared AIDS its ''number one priority,'' Mr. Reagan himself has been criticized by groups calling for more Government action on the disease.

    ...

    But Mr. Reagan resisted the suggestion that more money was needed. He said that AIDS had been ''one of the top priorities with us'' and that the Administration had provided or appropriated some half a billion dollars for research on AIDS since he took office in 1981. He included in that figure the $126 million that the Administration is seeking for the next budget year. ''So this is a top priority with us,'' he said. ''Yes, there's no question about the seriousness of this, and the need to find an answer.''

    When told that the top AIDS scientist had said the Administration's budgets were ''not nearly enough at this stage to go forward and really attack the problem,'' Mr. Reagan replied: ''I think with our bdugetary restraints and all it seems to me that $126 million in a single year for research has got to be something of a vital contribution.''
     
  16. Denny Crane

    Denny Crane It's not even loaded! Staff Member Administrator

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    http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/power-players/elton-john-george-w-bush-taught-lesson-040430553.html

    Rock 'n Roll Hall of Famer Elton John once called President George W. Bush "the worst thing that ever happened to America." But in an interview with ABC News/Yahoo! Power Players series, Sir Elton offers a different description of Bush: The U.S. President who has done most to fight AIDS.

    Asked directly what President has done more than any other to combat AIDS, John answered without hesitation: "George Bush."

    Elton John, who has been a leading activist on AIDS issues since the 1980s, gives President Bush credit for launching the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) a $15 billion program Bush signed into law in 2004 to provide treatment and prevention for millions of HIV-infected people in Africa.

    Prior to that, John had been among President Bush's harshest and most acerbic critics.

    "I wasn't a big fan of his policies," John said. "I was very against the Iraq war. So, you know, his policies didn't sit well with mine."

    But not long after Bush launched his anti-AIDS effort, Elton John had a chance to meet him in person. The occasion was the 2004 Kennedy Center Honors.

    "At the Kennedy Center concert we spent some time in the intermission with the President, George Bush, and he was an amazingly informed about AIDS," John recounted. "He treated us with such kindness. I had so much respect for him, especially when the PEPFAR thing was announced when he gave 15 billion dollars to AIDS. He knew what he was talking about."

    Politics aside, personal interaction caused John to change his view of Bush.

    "One of the old adages in life is never judge someone until you meet them," John said. "I didn't like his policies but I have to say when I met him, I found him charming, I found him well informed and I found him determined to do something about the AIDS situation so I changed my opinion of him. And his wife was astonishingly kind to us well. So it was -- I learned a lesson."
     
  17. Denny Crane

    Denny Crane It's not even loaded! Staff Member Administrator

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    Bush doesn't like black people.
     
  18. SlyPokerDog

    SlyPokerDog Woof! Staff Member Administrator

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    Bill Clinton Cautioned That Hillary’s “Discomfort” Around Gay Issues Would Hurt Her Political Ambitions


    Bill Clinton warned a close friend in 2000 that Hillary’s New York Senate run could suffer because she was not “comfortable around gay people who were kind of acting out, or pushing her to the limit,” and that she had a “general discomfort” around gay rights issues.
    That close friend, as it happens, was author and historian Taylor Branch, who conducted dozens of late-night interviews with Bill from the early ’90s to 2000 to write a book chronicling the Clinton White House.

    The president kept all the sole audio recordings of those interviews, but Branch took notes and recounted audio notes into a tape recorder after each interview session concluded.

    According to one of those audio clips from June 10, 1999 obtained by the Free Beacon, Branch was in the middle of an interview with President Clinton when Bill stepped out of the room to take a phone call from Hillary.

    When he came back into the room, he was distracted by his wife’s stance on gay rights.

    “[Bill] came in and he said, ‘You know I’ve had much more contact in my life with gay people than Hillary has,’” Branch says in the audio recording. “He said, ‘I think she’s really a little put off by some of this stuff.

    http://www.queerty.com/bill-clinton...ssues-would-hurt-her-2000-senate-bid-20150924
     
  19. SlyPokerDog

    SlyPokerDog Woof! Staff Member Administrator

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    I'd like to get @KingAlbertoJrSpeed perspective on some of this, he's a big Hillary supporter.
     
  20. Denny Crane

    Denny Crane It's not even loaded! Staff Member Administrator

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    I'm quite sure Reagan knew his buddy Rock Hudson was gay all along. He loved him anyway.

    Given the political climate, he did what he could, which was to spend lots of money on research and to start speaking about AIDS in public once a few thousand died from it.
     

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