- PEPFAR is the federal government's anti–HIV/AIDS foreign aid program, established by the Global AIDS Act of 2003 and renewed in 2008 and 2013. It is the single largest global health initiative targeting a single disease in history.
- PEPFAR is an accomplishment that deserves to stand alongside the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, the Marshall Plan, and Social Security as one of the greatest spending programs the federal government ever enacted.
Is this one good policy supposed to outweigh the thousands of other bad policies he had? Honestly, I think it's impossible for a president to have nothing but bad policies. Obviously you'll have some good ones. It's kind of sad that this article only focuses on one of his good ones, I imagine he had more than one good idea, yet this author didn't bring any of those up. I see too many "liberal" comments and anti-Obama comments in this. It's just the standard one party slinging shit at the other. Saying "Obama is ruining WBush's legacy program!" means nothing to me, because I dislike Obama and WBush both. I'm also not a liberal. I also think the first paragraph's disclaimer at the beginning was just a comical way to make "liberals" think he was on their side.
This article is horrible. How can you say he should be locked up in The Hague but he wasn't that bad? If you ignore all the bad you can find good policy from any politician and frame them the same way. Nixon was a paranoid weirdo but he created the EPA. Mussolini wanted to help conquer Europe but at least the trains ran on time. Say what you will about Hitler but at least he killed Hitler
The author wants people to pay attention to what he wrote and that's about it. This article about Nixon is a good reappraisal of an awful president. Bush doing one good thing and claiming utilitarianism as his saving grace is either dishonest or lazy.
Whether you think Bush was a good or bad president, it's undeniable that he was an effective one. He got a LOT done, much of which I whole heartedly disagree with, but the guy was able to enact his policy and vision. He completely capitalized on a state of fear and amenable-ness of his electorate at the time.
The article glosses over that pretty quickly. While this program saved lives, how many have been lost (and money wasted) because Bush refused to simply give people some condoms? Not really an accurate portrayal without including that in the tally. edit: Here's some further reading for those interested Some relevant quotes:It has funded abstinence-only programs that have proven ineffective at reducing infection rates,
Under the current policy, one third of the money allocated to HIV prevention goes to abstinence-only campaigns, often run by evangelical allies of the administration.
But this figure is also deceptive, because the prevention budget includes things like fighting mother-to-child transmission. In fact, a full two-thirds of the money for the prevention of the sexual spread of HIV goes to abstinence. What's left is targeted to groups considered high-risk. HIV-activists have spent the last two decades trying to show that condoms aren't just for prostitutes and the promiscuous; Bush has undone much of their work.
I've basically begun arguing that he is actually the worst president in American history. Yes, even worse than Harding! Though the tax plan he created at the start of his presidency was, at the very least arguably, economically sound for the time, as soon as we entered wartime mode we should have done more to balance our fiscal budget and return taxes to their normal levels. When the economic collapse happened in 2008, the fiscal response was anemic because we had been running on empty already for several years. Not to mention the whole 'illegal war of aggression' thing. Presidents like Harding and Grant had their corruption scandals, guys like Polk were marred with controversial war, and Hoover led the country through its worst economic collapse. Bush somehow managed to accomplish all three of these major catastrophes during his administration.
I never had a problem with him https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthy_Forests_Initiative