Bono didn’t waste words during his talk with Bill O’Reilly, making another impressive appeal for the U.S. to lead the way in addressing Africa’s emergency.
But notice how Bill O’Reilly tries to change the subject whenever Bono starts criticizing the U.S.?
I appreciate Bono’s enthusiasm, and I agree with his premise. But we’ve got a war on terror to fight (though it will eventually have an African component) and the President has spent 15 billion dollars to fight AIDS in Africa. Bono’s strategy at this point should be to encourage the Americans and also find help elsewhere. I think we should do everything we can to help, but we simply can’t do everything at once.
Just to make sure we have our facts straight, here, *all* the rich nations are being asked for a fair share contribution, not just the US. There have been highly publicized DATA campaigns with the governments of Canada, France, the UK, and Germany just for a start.
And while Bush did *propose* a figure of $15B over 5 years beginnng FY2004, in the 2003 State of the Union, it’s far from “already spent.” It turned out only $10B of that was new money anyway, and the rest was being “counted” or shuffled from existing programs. As of Jan 2004, one full year after that State of the Union, not a penny of the proposal had actually gone to AIDS in Africa. Some has by now – a few million. But for FY04 and (so far) FY05, the amounts authorized aren’t on track to achieve that total $15B proposal by 2009.
Don’t get me wrong, I totally applaud Bush’s attention and commitment to this issue, and his initial proposal and the heart behind it. But after cuts and legislative politicking and so on, how much of even the relatively small amount he proposed is actually going to get there?
….Not $15B, anyway. IMHO.
I’m not a big fan of Bono, but I thought it was a pretty good interview. It never gets mentioned though how the AIDS crisis in Africa is something that the church has really dropped the ball on. The cure for the crisis will need to be both medically and spiritually for it to ever be solved, and its a sad testimonial on the church when we need to send our government to do missionary work.