Reagan Docudrama

I must be getting old. CBS is airing a docudrama on Ronald Reagan in November. It used to be that TV networks did docudramas on contemporary U.S. Presidents I don't remember!

"The Reagans," a two-parter airing on CBS on November 16 and November 18, has already drawn fire from several conservatives for - you guessed it - portraying Ronald and Nancy Reagan in an unflattering light. The main controversy seems to be Reagan's attitude toward homosexuals. Reagan is depicted as a homophobe who dismisses AIDS as a gay disease and says AIDS patients get what they deserve because "they that live in sin shall die in sin."

Ultraconservative columnist Cal Thomas, whose columns provide about the same pleasure as chewing large shards of broken glass, found some time he otherwise might have spent questioning the growing number of casualties in the aftermath of the Iraq War (a war he enthusiastically supported, of course) to bash the Reagan movie. He quoted a Reagan staffer as saying that Reagan made no such comment, and that he even allowed a gay couple (the White House interior decorator and his boyfriend) to stay at the executive mansion overnight, much to the chagrin of Reagan's Christian conservative supporters. Thomas also cites a 1988 letter Reagan wrote to AIDS sufferer Elizabeth Glaser, whose own daughter had died from the disease (Mrs. Glaser had contacted it from a blood transfusion) promising that his administration was moving as quickly as it could to combat it.

Okay, Reagan probably wasn't a homophobe, and TV movie producers insisting otherwise probably have an axe to grind. But Thomas ignores the unpleasant truth that the Reagan administration mostly dragged its heels on the AIDS crisis, thinking it was an epidemic that would go away quickly and would affect very few people. Also, much of the heavy lifting on AIDS was done by two men in the administration, Health and Human Services Secretary Otis Bowen (who served from 1985 to 1989) and the controversial C. Everett Koop, the Surgeon General famous for both his endorsement of condom availability and his fringe beard.

Thomas has some other problems with the docudrama, of course, complaining that it slanders "one of our most successful and beloved presidents" by refusing to credit him for the economic boom of the 1980's. Never mind the tripled national debt and the doubled budget deficit, as well as social progam cuts that left a lot of people out of the prosperity of the eighties.

And how about what Reagan's documented utterances? Maybe he didn't say that AIDS patients got what they deserved, but he did insist that trees cause more pollution than cars, that nuclear missiles can be recalled after they've been fired, or that Central American mercenaries were the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers!

It's sad that Reagan has Alzheimer's disease, but as The Nation once asked about Reagan fan Dinesh D'Souza, why does Cal Thomas have to force such a disease on the rest of us?

P.S. Thomas mentioned in this column that he appears on Fox News. He does that a lot. Why does he have to keep doing it??