BushCo McLieFactory

This Modern World: Jeanne d'Arc: Helpless

"How in the world do Bush and Company have the nerve to claim to be supporting AIDS treatment, when they're not coughing up any funds? Well, it depends on how you define 'support.'

In March, in an annual report on the program, the Bush administration said support could include general 'system strengthening' -- a category so broad that it could allow officials to claim to have supported treatment of any AIDS patient who benefited, however indirectly, from U.S. government assistance.

The head of the Bush administration's program in Botswana, Peter H. Kilmarx, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said in an interview here in May that he was aware of the upset among the Botswanan officials but that the treatment claims fit within U.S. government guidelines. The definition used for measuring support, he said, had broadened to the point that even assistance as trivial as editing a government health official's speeches could allow the Bush program to say it had supported treatment for everyone receiving antiretrovirals from that nation's public health system.

To people who define 'supporting the troops' as sticking flags on their bumpers, I guess that makes sense."