LogFAQs > #909034384

Bush basically got no political credit for PEPFAR, got negative press for bad but not fatally bad mistakes, and did this entirely unforced. Like, if he was the bottom of the list, I think doing the equivalent of preventing 11 Civil Wars, stopping half of the holocaust or preventing the Khmer Rouge from coming to be power in Cambodia 3 times w.r.t. lives saved. (Also, taking the worst case estimates of direct casualties + knock on deaths, PEPFAR saved about 7x the number of lives) should count for *something*.

It's not clear to me that many alternative presidents could do significantly better under the war on terror (and the iraq war was terrible, but a major international foreign intelligence failure was a contributor too).