The 1980s were just a vitrolic as they were today. Reagan was called a Nazi just like Bush was. Nothing’s different. It was — folks, if you weren’t alive then or if you weren’t old enough to be paying attention, do not doubt me. The hatred for Ronald Reagan was universal in the Democrat Party and throughout the media. These people blamed AIDS on Reagan. Sound familar? They blamed homelessness on Reagan — you know why they blamed AIDS on Reagan? Because he didn’t care. Because he never delivered a speech about it. And because of that, AIDS was spread. They actually wanted us to believe that Reagan had the disease, was sneaking into gay people’s houses at night, and impregnating them with the disease and running out. And when we left their houses he went over to Grant Park, or wherever it was, Lafayette Park and stole the pork and beans of the homeless and took them back to the White House and fixed them up and at them. That’s that kind of stuff they were saying about Reagan.
—Rush Limbaugh, still blaming the lamestream media and those Democrats for President Ronald Reagan’s atrocious record on AIDS, is now shooting down conspiracy theories that never existed [via]
Joe B.
Big sloppy addicts get the facts wrong from time to time. You can’t blame Rush, he needed to take all that Oxy because of all the gay people trying to convert him wherever he goes.
Eventually in order to hush the crowds of hotties that were pursuing him personally he overdosed on the stuff to make himself deaf so he wouldn’t need to hear the plaintive cry of the modern American homosexual.
But, big sloppy addicts are prone to self-abuse. Whatcha gonna do?
Gregger
@Joe B.: That!!!
justiceontherocks
Wonder if he cleared this script with his good buddy and new daddy Elton.
tjr101
The right in America will gladly give Reagan’s corpse a bj if they got the chance. Reagan was a disaster for America and no amount of revisionism will hide that fact.
Kev C
Sounds like something Reagan would do.
Cam
Wow, so after the AZ. shootings, they couldn’t use the usual subjects to get their audiences foaming at the mouth angry, so now they have to pretend that gays are going around spreading weird, disturbing stories about Reagan. Rush will do whatever he possibly can to keep those ratings up.
Toby
I hate it when Rush is on his pills.
Mr. Enemabag Jones
If anyone wants to know what Reagan’s 1980’s were like, just watch, “Roger & Me” by Michael Moore.
Soupy
Or watch “Angels in America”.
Francis
Wonder what Mr. Reginald Dwight has to say about this.
I Remember
Rush got one thing right. Reagan didn’t care. As far as he was concerned the gay people could die off and it was no skin off his nose. Until it became too significant an issue and the political fire was too hot he did nothing-absolutely nothing. That meant years of government funding and research lost and thousands of Americans dead. After all why should Reagan care about fags they aren’t his type of people
Jim Hlavac
It was not just Reagan who never mentioned AIDS until the political heat was turned up. No one mentioned it. It was called GRID — gay related immune disorder — in the beginning, until AIDS was settled on by 1985. No one knew about HIV until the mid-1980s, but they found out precisely because the CDC and NIH investigated the outbreak of weird pneumonias and Karposi’s Sarcoma from the moment they started to appear, exactly as the health bureaucracy was supposed to do. No one tried to stop the investigations and money in the budget was moved to the new research. No one had an earthly clue as to what was happening, and many did go scampering about to figure it out. To blame just Reagan is unfair, and he was no more or less anti-gay than any other politician of any party at the time. As far as nearly all politicians were concerned we could all have died off. At the same time Lyme Disease and Legionaire’s Disease surfaced, and Reagan never mentioned them either. In fact, it’s rare for any president to talk about diseases of any kind. I’m not saying anyone has to like Reagan, but don’t blame him for something that he didn’t do, or couldn’t mention, or single him out as some special force against gay folks. He’s just part of the big anti-gay system we had at the time. And it was big. In 1986 the Supreme Court ruled that any law against us was fine — in both Democratic and Republican run states, based on Democratic Georgia’s appeal in Bowers V. Hardwick. Why, even the NY Times wouldn’t use the word “gay” to mean gay folks until 1986. We often forget just how invisible gay folks were in the early 1980s.
Giovannidude
@No.12 — AIDS wasn’t Reagan’s fault, but it might have been the Nixon Administration’s fault. That’s who was in power when an Assistant Secretary of Defense went before a Congressional Committee to talk about a proposed U.S. Army program to produce an artificial virus that would attack the immune system and would be very difficult if not impossible to trace. A biological weapon, in other words. The program would only cost $10 million, he said.
damon459
@Giovannidude: I might buy that except evidence shows HIV existed in the 1950’s so I guess by your reasoning we could blame Truman and Eisenhower since they were in office then though nobody knew about the virus yet.