Mike Huckabee once advocated isolating AIDS patients from the general public

I have this nagging premonition that if Mike Huckabee is the GOP nominee past comments like these will haunt him all the way to a general election defeat next November.

UPDATE:

Politico is following the story now, as is Drudge who just removed the item about Huckabee doubling Romney’s numbers in Iowa, and replaced it with this one now at the top of the page in big red letters. I don’t know if Gov. Huckabee is going to be on any of the Sunday morning talk shows tomorrow, but if he is, the direction of the questioning he should expect just took a different turn.

ALSO:

Jonathan Adler adds this note:

In 1992 Hucakbee supported an AIDS quarantine, despite the lack of any real public health justification for such a step. Today he supports a federal smoking ban in public places. This causes me to wonder: Is Huckabee willing to throw the idea of limited government out the window any time there is a plausible (or even not so plausible) public health argument for doing so?

Contrast Huckabee’s apparent nanny-state approach with Fred Thompson’s.

MORE:

Dan Riehl says that Huckabee and Ahmadienejad are “perfect together”.

Team Huckabee attempts damage control. Will it work?

Fred Thompson is attempting to exploit Huckabee’s gaffe with a bus tour.

Wizbang thinks that much of Huckabee’s recent rise in the polls was attributable to the “same phenomenon which sees ‘generic’ candidates faring better than specific ones.” If that’s true, then a downfall is inevitable too now that he has become a “specific” candidate.

Allahpundit notes that while the Huckabee camp is touting the 1991 congressional testimony of Kimberly Bergalis who cast some doubt on the subject of how AIDS was transmitted, it was three years before then that Surgeon General C. Everett Koop sent an unprecedented mass mailing to every American household saying this (emphasis in original):

AIDS IS NOT SPREAD BY CASUAL, NONSEXUAL CONTACT, IT IS SPREAD BY HIGH RISK SEXUAL AND DRUG RELATED BEHAVIORS–BEHAVIORS THAT WE CAN CHOOSE TO AVOID. EVERY PERSON CAN REDUCE THE RISK OF EXPOSURE TO THE AIDS VIRUS THROUGH PREVENTIVE MEASURES THAT ARE SIMPLE, STRAIGHTFORWARD, AND EFFECTIVE.

The nomination of John Kerry in 2004 inevitably meant that the Vietnam War was going to be refought on the mat of presidential politics. Next year a Huckabee nomination revisits another old battleground: the AIDS battles of the 80s. Last time around Democrats nominated the candidate who was going to lose an old battle for a second time because the first time he was on the side of those against America winning a war. This time, it is Republicans who risk choosing a member of history’s losing side to represent them.

If Huckabee is nominated can you say “AIDS Veterans for Truth”?

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