Script doctors wanted
The slur against Reagan surely reflects AIDS as an issue in the culture war as well as the charge that Reagan didn't deal with AIDS aggressively because it was mostly killing gay men. There's no evidence for that charge. It would be fairer to say that Reagan, like many conservatives, thought that halting the AIDS epidemic depended less on vast government programs than on stopping the irresponsible personal behavior that created and spread the epidemic. People ought to be able to criticize Reagan about this without calling him a murderer of gays, as Larry Kramer and his group, ACT-UP, repeatedly did during the 1980s.
The problem is that the Hollywood left is probably as incapable of doing a fair treatment of Reagan as Richard Mellon Scaife would be of doing one about the Clintons. Alessandra Stanley, the TV critic of the New York Times, put it mildly when she wrote that the producers of the Reagan miniseries "appear to have sacrificed showmanship to self-righteousness, adopting a preachy, liberal agenda."
Even when dealing with fumbles by the Reagan administration, the script manages to be over the top. The Reagan team shamefully tried to scant the poor by classifying ketchup as a vegetable in school lunch programs. This is handled as unsubtly as possible by having Judy Davis, portraying Nancy Reagan, shrieking at the Reagan character: "Ketchup is a vegetable! It is not a meat, right? So it is a vegetable!" Davis said she hoped the script would encourage Americans to examine their leaders more closely. Maybe the lesson is more obvious: Now we must examine our politically loaded TV dramas more closely.
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