The Hill News

Actor and activist Matt Damon, not typically a Republican supporter, this week gushed over former President George W. Bush's work fighting AIDS in Africa, saying it made him want to kiss the Texan “on the mouth.”

Damon, a foreign aid activist who co-founded the nongovernmental organization Water.org, had high praise for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a commitment by the United States to spend $15 billion over five years fighting HIV/AIDS that Bush signed into law.

“I would kiss George W. Bush on the mouth for what he did on PEPFAR,” Damon told The Atlantic in an interview published Wednesday night. “! [For] three seconds. No tongue.”

Damon called the distribution of anti-retroviral drugs “an incredible thing” that prompted a sense of “national pride” when he toured Africa in 2006.

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