On Fox News Sunday, Mike Huckabee seemed to deny that in 1992 he advocated quarantining AIDS patients. Not sure how that squares with the AP's account that he told them ""If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague." More when the transcript is up.
Update: Mike Allen has the essentials:
REALITY CHECK 2 – Gov. Huckabee on Fox News Sunday today:
"Chris, I didn't say that we should quarantine. I said it was the first time in public health protocols that when we had an infectious disease and we didn't really know just how extensive and how dramatic it could be and the impact of it, that we didn't isolate the carrier."
What Huckabee wrote on his questionnaire:
"If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague. It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population, and in which this deadly disease for which there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crisis it represents."
Dictionary.com: quar-an-tine (noun) a strict isolation imposed to prevent the spread of disease.
At a minimum it seems that Huckabee was playing an extremely disengenuous semantic game. We'll see if anyone calls him on it.
--Michael Crowley