Youth in Vietnam Ignored by PEPFAR

June 6, 2007


Bush's announcement last week to double the funding for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to $30 billion was nothing less than political brilliance on his part. I mean that genuinely. It was a preemptive strike to once again claim empathetic superiority in an area once reserved for well-meaning progressives. Yes, it was also timed to provide cover for Bush's anti-environmentalism in advance of the G8 Summit, but here at home, it had the added utility of once again using an abundance of funding to disguise underlying policy flaws-deliberate and favored-that are hampering a good program from being a great one.

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