From Think Progress, who are astonished that the right-wing Reaganites (remember, Reagan fought his own Surgeon General regarding HIV and AIDS, and whether the public health threat the virus and diseases posed should receive federal funding to identify and treat and prevent):

In a column titled “Callous Conservative” in today’s Washington Post, former Bush White House aide Michael Gerson criticizes Fred Thompson’s stance on international AIDS funding.

At a campaign stop last week, Thompson was asked if he, “as a Christian, as a conservative,” supported President Bush’s global AIDS initiative.Thompson said there are larger “problems” at home and that it was not his “priority” to fund HIV/AIDS efforts in Africa:

“Christ didn’t tell us to go to the government and pass a bill to get some of these social problems dealt with. He told us to do it,” Thompson responded. “The government has its role, but we need to keep firmly in mind the role of the government, and the role of us as individuals and as Christians on the other.”

“I’m not going to go around the state and the country with regards to a serious problem and say that I’m going to prioritize that. With people dying of cancer, and heart disease, and children dying of leukemia still, I got to tell you — we’ve got a lot of problems here…”

But the right wing is outraged at Gerson, rather than Thompson.

The right wing wants people who are brown to die.
They don’t care how it happens or why it happens.
They don’t care whether bullets, bombs, or bugs kill brown people, just as long as none of those things threaten their shiny white fannies.

AIDS has taken a devastating toll around the world, but in Africa it has done perhaps its cruelest damage, because it has laid waste young adults — leaving children without parents; leaving elderly people without children; leaving whole nations without a workforce aged 25-60, on a continent where the ravages of  Read more