This is an Andrew Sullivan post about the various myths relating to Ronald Reagan's AIDS policy, aroused by the movie version of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America". Now the reason I'm linking is to say a few words about the play's author. Having been forcibly subjected to one of Mr. Kushner's "speeches" at a graduation last summer, I feel qualified to make one or two comments on Mr. Kushner and his ideas.

First and formost, Tony Kushner is an idiot. And not merely an idiot, a demagogic, self-righteous, cosmically asinine fool who is absolutely one hundred percent certain that he is a fearless truth-teller facing down the insidious forces of international evil and divinely appointed to bring the painful truth to stupid, self-absorbed, complacent rich white people like you and me. He is an insulting, racist, bloviating, disrespectful, publicity loving whore who is convinced that conservative Republicans, which in his definition means anyone to the Right of Noam Chomsky, are the only real threat to human freedom and dignity and the assorted forces of Leftist totalitarianism, radical Islam, and the collective inability of mainstream Liberalism to stand up to them are merely the illusory products of an insidious conspiracy of Right-wing forces who are using these false constructions to press their real agenda of gay-hating, racist, globalizing capitalism whose only real purpose is to enslve the world under the thumb of the Bush family. This worldview is so badly thought out and articulated that to listen to him speak is to listen to the pathetic whinings of a middle-aged child who cannot concieve of the fact that people might disgagree with him and actually have decent, intelligent reasons for doing so. He traffics in an arrogant, pretentiously verbose cocktail-party radicalism which makes perfect sense to him and his limosine-leftist freinds but appears to all the rest of us as the blubbering pretentions of a no-talent hack with an inferiority complex. Francois Truffaut, when he called Jean-Luc Godard a "piece of shit on a pedestal", could easily have been talking about this monument to the moral, intellectual, and artistic bankruptcy of America's creative elite. The fact that this odious amateur's ninety-odd hour, insomnia-curing diatribes against all his imagined enemies, his anti-historical pseudo-Brechtian demonizations of any and all who dare to deviate from his fanatical ideology, his reprehensible poison pen letters to one of the few countries in the world where an openly gay man like himself could become rich writing plays excorating said country in the most vile of terms, have actually won the Pulitzer Prize speaks volumes for the collapse of what was once a vibrant, albriet arrogant and closeted artistic elite. Kushner is the epitome of the insidious banality pioneered by his hero Brecht who, when challenged that Stalin's Terror was murdering innocent people replied "the moe innocent they are, the more they deserve to die". Kushner, of course doesn't even have the guts to be that honest. He is a gutless, cowardly tool in the hands of political evil. His work is a pollution, a stain on American culture, a monument to the tyrannical sympathies and ferocious embrace of political evil that today typifies an American artistic alite collapsed, bankrupt, and pathetic behind their decaying ramparts.