Surgeon General's Mourning

Or

Flown the Koop

(Props to Shawn)

Or

The Koop de Grace Has Been Delivered

(Kudos to Chris N)
C. Everett Koop, the only unindicted member of the Reagan Cabinet, has died at the age of 96. An early casualty in the Republican war on science and reason, he was pilloried by conservatives for suggesting that education and condoms could do more to stem the spread of the AIDS epidemic than ignorance and prayers. Although the deeply religious Koop opposed homosexuality, he insisted that young people did not deserve a death sentence because they didn’t know how the virus spread. Originally appointed because Reagan thought he would use the office to condemn abortions, Koop refused to make his office about his religion, declining to issue a report requested by the administration about the harmful psychological effects of abortion on mothers, citing the complete lack of compelling evidence. Koop also didn’t win any friends by taking on Big Tobacco by blaming “the merchants of death” for more than 300,000 preventable deaths a year and forcing cigarette packaging to bear the Surgeon General’s warning. Before Koop, the Surgeon General was a thankless job with a miniscule budget and even less authority. Koop used his bully pulpit to establish himself as the nation’s moral authority, with his Amish-style beard and dress uniform helping convince the nation that anyone that square must be legit.