Will someone pay me if I make shit up and rant like a loon?

I've found myself wondering what inner workings compel David Horowitz to act like Pat Buchanan on acid. Perhaps the psychological torment of seeing his beatnik parents, reciting bon mots from Mao's Little Red Book, in carnal embrace? I sometimes feel bad that he is so completely and utterly disconnected from any semblance of reality.

And then I remember that Horowitz is being paid handsomely in wingnut largesse so that he can continue publishing his delusional drivel:

Nearly thirty years after the onset of the AIDS epidemic and several hundred thousand mainly needless deaths, the US government is finally adopting a testing policy, which would have provided a frontline defense against the spread of the disease. Testing is the standard and proven way to fight epidemics and contain them. Testing for AIDS is especially important because the retrovirus lurks in the body without visible symptoms for long periods of time. Hence an AIDS infected person will not know they have the disease and can infect others. According to the NY Times report on the new testing policy, more than 50 percent of new AIDS carriers don't know they have the disease. That's 250,000 individuals, mainly Hispanic and Black. And that's mroe [sic] than 25 years after the first cases were identified and despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent on AIDS "education."

The hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths that have occurred since the onset of the epidemic were not accidents. They were caused by a political campaign mounted by the left to prevent standard public health policies -- testing most prominent among them -- from being implemented. In the name of political correctness the left has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of mainly young, mainly gay men. The left's argument -- testing will stigmatize AIDS victims and the government will put them in concentration camps -- was as hysterical and insane then as its its argument that the Bush Administration has created the terrorists and if we give them what they want they will go home. But it was persuasive enough to liberals and the Democratic Party and public officials like C. Everett Koop, that hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted on education campaigns that didn't work,and unsuspecting gays were left to die.

The consequences of the left's murderous propaganda and policy demands were known at the time. Peter Collier and I sounded an alarm in 1983. Michael Fumento and other conservatives followed in an attempt to counter the left's campaign to disarm the gay community in the face of this threat with reasoned argument and evidence. But to no avail. The leftwing juggernaut was too powerful, and the grim result is now there for anyone with eyes to see. Let's hope that the left's current campaign to disarm America in the face of the Islamic threat will not succeed the way this one did.

So now we're supposed to believe that culture warrior David Horowitz is standing up for the health of fornicating sodomites because "the Left" let them down? (Apparently, we are.)

I suppose Horowitz was pushing these "standard public health measures" twenty years ago while his hero, über-president Ronald Reagan refused to publically acknowledge [pdf] the skyrocketing rates of HIV infection until 1987 - six years after the first inklings of the epidemic - effectively refusing to commit the resources of the federal government to fighting AIDS.

I also find it telling that Horowitz singles out gays and minorities in his piece (the NYT article says that the CDC recommends that HIV screening become part of routine medical care). Why single these groups out? Isn't "the Left" also waging a war against the 35% of HIV+ individuals infected by heterosexual partners?

And why bash on education when there are plenty of credible studies which clearly demonstrate the efficacy of HIV education?

Let's step back for a moment and follow Horowitz's logic: HIV education has clearly failed; that is, warning gay men (exclusively, in his fevered brain) of a disease that can kill them and giving them the tools to prevent infection has not stemmed the rate of infection. Out at the Freedom Center, one can imagine Horowitz holding forth about how AIDS education just empowers the gays to keep having libinous gay sex, which is, of course, the cause of AIDS. If those men would just stop having hours and hours of well-oiled, manly gay sex, AIDS would just go away.

And how would testing solve the problem? In Horowitz's house of mirrors, mandatory HIV screening is the first step towards criminalizing HIV transmission: containing the epidemic by compelling infected individuals to adhere to a regime which eliminates the risk of transmission (which could lead to the outlawing of homosexuality as a "public health risk, you know, like smoking"), or by containing the epidemic in our jails (where, incidentally, sticky, musky gay sex never occurs). Bigotry all tarted up in the rationalizations of the law.

Yes, crazy Dave - it's "the Left"'s fault that there is still the AIDS. It's "the Left" who has gutted inner-city public education funding, ensuring that the minorities Horowitz sees fit to defend when it serves his (wildly outlandish) rhetorical points may never have an opportunity to receive proper HIV education. And I doubt he'll savor - or even notice - the irony of his "mandatory screening during routine exams" regime failing to dent the transmission rate for exactly the same reason: the ideological anti-tax hostility ("drowning government in the bathtub") towards any sort of public health policy which would allow people from disadvantaged social milieu access to medical care.

God, the more I think about the case Horowitz makes here, the more boggled I become. It doesn't make sense on so many different levels. So the trick is to stop thinking about it.

Done.