New York Times writer Alessandra Stanley advanced the CBS-Reagan miniseries story today by noting that actor James Brolin said his performance was “partly inspired” by the Reagan puppet of the British puppet show “Spitting Image.” (Pop music fans may remember those puppets from the Genesis video for “Land of Confusion.”) But Stanley goes off the deep end with this:

“CBS had already cut the scene, invented for the film, in which Mr. Reagan says in response to his wife’s worry about the AIDS crisis, ‘They that live in sin shall die in sin.’ When the scope of the disease emerged, historians mostly agree, Mr. Reagan was disengaged and averse to alienating his political base, but that might have been true of any president in office at the time. (‘The Reagans’ script seems to make him out to be closer to Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust.)” On how many different levels is this offensive?