It probably impinged on several populations; it’s just that the gay male population was the first one where it could really spread like wildfire. I make no moral judgments at all; this is simply a virus and it will infect any human with which it comes in contact. (And with any contagious disease, it will also spread preferentially in poorer populations.)

However, once the thing started spreading there, you can bet your ass the gov’t figured as long as it’s killing the right people, might as well let it keep going. They didn’t make the weapon, but they didn’t exactly rush to pitch in when it became clear that it was taking out the untermenschen.

There was tons of evidence at the time that it was set loose by our government as a weapon against gays and that drug users (read “blacks”) ended up just being collateral damage. In all of the study I’ve done since then I’ve never seen a persuasive argument against this theory.

The Reagan/Bush I comparison is one that had occurred to me early on, before the Ghost of McGovern stuck his ugly head in. Two-term economic and military disaster of a president who handed things off to his sidekick just fine because of a vicious press and a bunch of too-good-to-fight Dems for wghom it was more important to lose with ideological purity than to win with the tiniest blot on your cheek.

And much as I like this article, that’s the major thing that angered the shit out of me about Dukakis that year. It wasn’t useless personality nonsense that offended me. It was the fact that he never once fought back against it.

And that the Dems, knowing what was to come, refused to engage. They knew what was happening, and they made the active choice not to fight back.

Now, they know what is to come, and they are going out of their way to choose someone who can be brought down with nonsense because they think it better to refuse to play the game and remain ideological pure and lose than to actually fight for the people they claim to represent — unions, old people, gay people, women, etc.

And the only reason black people aren’t included in there is because, since the hated populist this time is a woman, they had to find a black politician to bash her with or else they would have overplayed their hand as not-at-all-liberals. But they are content to have Obama lose, even know he’s going to — so their supposed commitment to the black community is also nonexistent.

She remarked in the book that when they won (as they rarely did) a legal battle, they got together and moped about how it didn’t matter, and when they lost one, they had big get-togethers with kleenexes and pizzas and crying. The comparison she used was that, if they had been a culture, an anthropologist would have said they had an excess of grieving rituals and no celebratory ones. All of liberalism is no different, and it’s repugnant. It’s selfish and wasteful.

That wasn’t the case with the New Deal. What the fuck happened? Liberalism has literally fallen in love with losing — find the worst possible candidate, the one that will give you the best crying jag you’ve ever had on election night, better even than last time, and nominate him. Then, order the pizzas and preemptively send out the invites for your friends to come over and mope.

They like losing. It makes them pure.

Well, the latte side likes losing, because it’s just an emotional whinefest to them. To the lunchbuckets, it’s economic catastrophe and they aren’t as crazy about picking the born loser.

Just based on the past history of the Dems picking the Sad Sack who couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag, the guy with ideological boogers hanging off his nose and the personality of lukewarm vanilla ice cream, I can predict it’ll be Obama. Even in Clinton wins brilliantly in IN and either takes NC or shaves it paper-thin. Just because Democrats are fatally attracted to complete losers. “We HAVE to pick him,” the superdels are telling themselves, “he doesn’t stand a chance.”