On ABC’s “Good Morning America” today, Charlie Gibson asked Michael Reagan: “Well, let me play devil’s advocate for a minute, because there are a lot of people who feel — now the quote is quite inflammatory, one that you mentioned about AIDS…But a lot of people feel, for instance, that your dad was slow to recognize the AIDS crisis, that it had festered for quite a period of time before he addressed it. So if you fictionalize that, is it necessarily wrong?”
In other words, if you “feel” that Reagan deserves a little fictional goosing to make his record on AIDS look as bad as you want it to look, exaggeration is not “wrong.” That’s artistic freedom applied for a positive social impact.