Andrew Sullivan's epithet

The June 13 Sunday Washington Post reports that "making the rounds on the Internet is the following White House Briefing Room transcript, dated Oct. 15, 1982," – when I interviewed White House Press Secretary Larry Speakes:

QUESTION: Larry, does the president have any reaction to the announcement – the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, that AIDS is now an epidemic and have over 600 cases?

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SPEAKES: What's AIDS?

QUESTION: Over a third of them have died. It's known as "gay plague." (Laughter.) No, it is. I mean it's a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died. And I wondered if the president is aware of it?

SPEAKES: I don't have it. Do you? (Laughter.)

(The laughter came from much of the rest of the White House press corps, which failed to follow up on this very serious issue.)

SPEAKES: No, I don't know anything about it, Lester.

QUESTION: Does the president, does anybody in the White House know about this epidemic, Larry?

SPEAKES: I don't think so. I don't think there's been any ...

QUESTION: Nobody knows?

What I have just learned from e-mailers and phone-callers, is that this 1982 transcript – plus another transcript dated Dec. 11, 1984 – was put on the website of Andrew Sullivan, columnist for New York Times magazine and the Sunday Times of London:

QUESTION: An estimated 300,000 people have been exposed to AIDS, which can be transmitted through saliva. Will the president, as commander in chief, take steps to protect Armed Forces food and medical services from AIDS patients or those who run the risk of spreading AIDS in the same manner that they forbid typhoid-fever people from being involved in the health or food services?

MR. SPEAKES: I don't know.

QUESTION: Is the president concerned about this subject, Larry?

MR. SPEAKES: I haven't heard him express ...

QUESTION: No, but, I mean, is he going to do anything, Larry?

MR. SPEAKES: Lester, I have not heard him express anything on it. Sorry.

QUESTION: You mean he has no – expressed no opinion about this epidemic?

MR. SPEAKES: No, but I must confess I haven't asked him about it. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: Would you ask him, Larry?

MR. SPEAKES: Have you been checked? (Laughter.)

(Again, the laughter came from the White House press corps Big Media, who refused to push this rather life-and-death question.)

What I found astonishing is that Oxford graduate and Harvard Ph.D. Sullivan described me – in his words – as: "a crack-pot of the far right."

The term "crack-pot" is, of course, beyond debate. For that slang expression is his expressed opinion and is impossible to disprove. Yet this diagnosis of me is very questionable, based on his enjoined rebuke: that I am "far right."

Does Mr. Andrew Sullivan believe it is "far right" of me to keep pressing for an answer as to where President Reagan stood on the AIDS epidemic?

Or does he believe it is "far right" of me to (1) oppose capital punishment, (2) support Roe v. Wade, (3) support euthanasia – and (4) never to have regretted carrying the California state flag at the head of that delegation as we marched into Montgomery in the Selma March?

Andrew Sullivan, Ph.D., obviously did not know what he was writing about. And the fact that he did not try to contact me before writing such an epithet is both a sad reflection on his journalistic credibility as well as what one of my e-mailers noted: "He takes a cheap swipe at you."