Reports on the Ray-gun miniseries, pleeze

I'm without Showtime, and waiting to hear what all the fascist blackmail of CBS was about. Especially curious what Saint Ronnie supposedly said about gays and AIDS, but any other tidbits welcome too.

Disclosure - this is my first trip to The Lounge after 2 years in GD. The candidate cannibalism finally got to me tonight. Bundbuster

let me sum up

Ronnie was awesome. Totally inept. You got Nancy on the phone talking to psychics while St. Ron is babbling about Jesus wanting him to end the cold war. St. Ron, at one point, answers the phone in the middle of the night - A general calling him to say that they had engaged fighter jets of some sort in the Middle East or something - St. Ronnie says "That's nice" and goes back to sleep. At one point Ronnie says that Aids is God's punishment against gays. Nancy visits an Aids clinic and gets convinced that Aids is a medical issue, not a social issue - but when she tries to tell Ronnie he's sitting in bed doing a crossword puzzle or reading intelligence reports. All through the movie, it is evident that Ronnie is influenced by the most hardline hawks in his cabinet who are out looking for the next boogeyman. Michael Deaver, one of Ronnie's close advisors, seems to be pretty levelheaded and annoyed at all the hawks closing in on the President. I didn't see the end, so I don't know what happened. I was really young then but I think Michael Deaver wound up being disgraced somehow. All in all it was awesome, Ronnie came across looking like a real jackass - which was refreshing.

(This place is so much more comfortable than "General Discusssion".)

"God's punishment" sounds about right on. As the Reagan years went on (and on) without the word AIDS ever being spoken, I had a very clear vision of the top Washington RWer's having a closed-door meeting in the early '80's about a policy decision, wherein a chorus was joined basically saying "Hey - don't be in a hurry here. After all, look who this disease is taking out - fags, niggers, drug addicts, and whores! It's doing our work for us." I was told around 1987 by someone "in the know" that just such a meeting did take place.

Your entire description of the RR scenario sounds alot like the nightmare unfolding today with Bonzo Jr.

it's pretty sad that we claim to live in a democracy, yet we inevitably wind up with a kind of nobility. That was what struck me about the miniseries more than anything, was that W. isn't some kind of neo-con, he's simply a descendant of an ideology and benefactor of a political lineage. All of the modern problems, then, become problems that are age old. It is impossible to move from our past. That's the important thing i took from the series, moreso than any individual snippet of Reagan being a pant-shitting old man.