While the US government did support UNITA against the MPLA it did not support RENAMO against FRELIMO. Instead largely following the example of Thatcher who advocated engagement with Maputo after they helped broker the Lancaster House Accords in Zimbabwe the Reagan White House actually provided various forms of aid including “non-lethal” military assistance to the FRELIMO regime. A lot of right wingers in the US were strongly opposed to the State Dept. policy regarding Mozambique. But, the State Dept. not these outlying groups controlled policy and the policy was to support FRELIMO not RENAMO.

Once again, hardly a genial charming person. Ronald Reagan took his political cues from Roy Cohn, a gay man who used his power on the House Unamerican Activities Committee to persecute gays and a Jew who gloried in being a public anti-Semite.

the point is, I think, that most people base their feelings and actions on what they *see* on TV; on TV, reagan is very attractive and well spoken, and, from woman I’ve talked to quite handsome.
This is what the brain processes, this handsome guy on TV.
The ability to think past our emotions – how many of us have given a quite attractive member of the opposite or appropriate sex a pass at one time or another because that person was attractive – is difficult; liberals should not pride themselves on this, but merely reflect that if it is that hard for many, are we really better.

f0r instance, today, as i write, you can almost feel the liberal blogosphere turning an idea into reality: on election day, exit polls showed that a majority of Americans are in favor of higher taxes on the rich.
but this cannot possibly be true, afaik, because exit polls were only done in 30 battleground states…

And even there is the gall to blast AIDS response, one of diaseses of the famous and the first political disease. For that got the best response.
Because for that many other diseases – not political – got pushed out of major funding.

It is true that in popular culture, there was a lot of concern for much longer than there needed to be that AIDS could be transmitted through casual contact. But the observed pattern of transmission, from the very start, and long before we had isolated the causative HIV, was clearly, definitively, and categorically limited to transmission by sexual contact and IV blood products.

It is also true, sadly, that when I refer to the popular culture harboring unnecessary concerns for casual transmission, that includes a whole lot of doctors and nurses who failed a rather elementary standard of professional conduct and refused to treat AIDS patients out of a fear of contagion that was clearly, had they not been dimwit bigots, not even justified, much less something that would have relieved them of their duty to the sick even if justified.

For a while there, there was a real possibility that we were going to have to labor under a completely unnecessary quarantine regime for AIDS. Some countries did indeed have quarantines, a completely unjustified and counter-productive measure except for diseases that can be transmitted by casual contact. We dodged that bullet in the US, but I blame both govt inattention and the foolish talk and personal example of some medical “professionals” for the near miss.

“Ignoring AIDS was not a passive endeavor. It was an active policy of the Reagan Administration.

[...]

The Surgeon General at that time, Dr C. Everett Koop should have been the one to lead the charge so that CDC could deliver an appropriate prevention program. However, he was forbidden to say anything about the disease for five and half years of Reagan’s term. Koop finally broke ranks with the Administration and issued a Surgeon General’s report in October 1986. For that, Koop was attacked within the Administration by a list of notables: Education Secretary William Bennett, his aid, Gary Bauer (who later became White House domestic policy adviser), and Patrick Buchanan, White House director of communications.

Buchanan had shown his colors well before joining the staff when he wrote about AIDS ‘The poor homosexuals. They have declared war on nature and now nature is exacting an awful retribution’.

[...]

As much of the world turns to the CDC for leadership in cases of new epidemics, the resulting vacuum had much wider ramifications. But with AIDS, it was not just an absence of leadership. It was often active obstruction of logical responses. These people caused immense preventable suffering and death – and it is likely that no one in the Reagan Administration will ever be held accountable.”

“…he relayed to me what the highest levels of government said about my plan to limit further spread of HIV. ‘Don, they rejected the plan. They said, “Look pretty and do as little as you can.”…
-snip-
The Director of CDC during those days, Dr James Mason, was also not willing to fight his bosses to protect the public from AIDS. Mason was a conservative appointee from Utah. Years later, as he looked back at the early AIDS years describing his inability to confront the conservative leadership, he stated ‘there are certain areas which, when the goals of science collide with moral and ethical judgment, science has to take a time out’.2 “

http://www.palgrave-journals.com/jphp/journal/v33/n3/full/jphp201214a.html

On the attitude of the government and democrats to gays, I remember riding down El Camino in the car with my dad (who prosecuted subversives as a very junior attorney in the Truman administration — upshot, Joe McCarthy was a lying drunken bastard, 98% of dangerous subversives were out for a buck) and something came on the radio about gay liberation — this would have been about 1975. Rather to my shock, his response was “I’m really glad to hear this. I remember back in the US Attorney’s office we used to have cases where there was nothing wrong with a guy except something he couldn’t help and he got into trouble because they could blackmail him.”

I note also that Harry Truman’s memoirs were ghost written by the openly gay Merle Miller.

I’m having a bad day as it is; I didn’t need to hear this.