Hillary Clinton Apologizes After Shocking Praise For Nancy Reagan's 'AIDS Activism' (UPDATE)

She was so out-of-touch with reality, it was baffling.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-nancy-reagan-aids-activism_us_56e31770e4b0b25c9181e002

JamesMichael Nichols

UPDATE: Clinton tweeted the following apology just hours after making her comment. The original story appears below Clinton's tweet.

PREVIOUSLY: Hillary Clinton seems to need some reminding about what happened in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. 

The Democratic presidential candidate made polarizing, inaccurate -- not to mention offensive -- comments on Friday about the role that the Reagans, specifically Nancy Reagan, played in combatting the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.

Speaking to MSNBC during the televised funeral for Reagan, who died on Sunday at the age of 94 from congestive heart failure, Clinton claimed that Nancy and her husband "started a national conversation" about the AIDS epidemic when "nobody would talk about it."

She said:

"It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s. And because of both President and Mrs. Reagan -- in particular Mrs. Reagan -- we started a national conversation. When before nobody would talk about it, nobody wanted to do anything about it, and that too is something that I really appreciate with her very effective, low key advocacy but it penetrated the public conscious and people began to say, 'Hey, we have to do something about this too.'"

Yet, as Teen Vogue wrote this week, Reagan actually turned her back on thousands of people, many of whom identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT), as they died from the virus during her time as first lady.

Similarly, The Guardian reported last year that the former first lady withheld help from close friend Rock Hudson when he reached out to the White House while dying of complications related to AIDS in1985. 

The Associated Press also points to a 2011 PBS documentary in which historian Adilla Black credited (with a caveat) Nancy Reagan's friendship with Hudson and attorney Roy Cohn, who also died from complications related to the disease, for inspiring her to "encourage her husband to seek more funding for AIDS research."

"I think she deserves credit for opening up the AIDS money," Black told PBS. "But I could never say that without saying they never would have waited this long if it was redheaded sixth graders."

"In the history of the AIDS epidemic, President Reagan's legacy is one of silence," said Michael Cover, former associate executive director for public affairs at Whitman-Walker Clinic, in 2003. "It is the silence of tens of thousands who died alone and unacknowledged, stigmatized by our government under his administration."

Even Chad Griffin, the President of The Human Rights Campaign, which endorsed Clinton for president earlier this year, spoke out on Twitter against her comments:

So, Hillary, let's stick to the facts and avoid romanticizing the memory of the Reagan's role in fighting against HIV/AIDS, shall we?

This Is Why Hillary Clinton's Comments About Nancy Reagan Still Matter

Her remarks on the late first lady's legacy on HIV and AIDS can't be forgotten

Sam Levine Associate Politics Editor, The Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-nancy-reagan-aids_us_56e44622e4b0860f99d93d02?utm_hp_ref=hillary-clinton

Hillary Clinton may have quickly apologized for her comments on Friday praising fellow former First Lady Nancy Reagan for her "effective" and "low key advocacy" on HIV and AIDS, but for many the remarks are still problematic.

Michelle Goldberg noted in Slate how absurd the former Secretary of State's comments were, given that the Reagan administration publicly laughed at the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Nancy Reagan did little to sway her husband, Goldberg said. 

"In policy terms, Clinton’s misguided praise for Nancy Reagan doesn't mean much; there’s certainly no reason to think she’d follow Reagan’s disgraceful example as president," Goldberg wrote. "But her words suggest that, on some deep level, she really is out of touch with progressive concerns."

Richard Kim wrote in The Nation that giving the Reagans credit for starting a conversation about HIV and AIDS was like giving George Wallace, the racist Alabama governor, credit for starting a national conversation about segregation. Kim wrote that while he did not think Clinton's comments signaled a shift on gay rights, they did show a lack of empathy to and awareness about HIV positive people and the gay community.

"And her apology, which doesn’t acknowledge the righteous pain caused by her remarks, indicates a social distance that gay men might want to take a closer look at," Kim wrote. " My hope is that she issues a new statement, one that really understands the gay community’s struggle with HIV/AIDS, the callousness of the Reagan administration, and pledges to do much, much, much better."

Noah Michelson, editorial director of The Huffington Post Voices, responded to Clinton's comments by writing about the impact AIDS had on his family.

"When I think of Hillary Clinton offering her eloquent ode yesterday to Nancy Reagan for the late first lady's supposed "very effective, low key [AIDS] advocacy" -- thereby not only ignoring the horrible, evil truth of what happened but actually rewriting history and casting Reagan as some kind of hero, I am absolutely furious and I don't know what to do with myself," he wrote. "When I think of Clinton then tweeting her terse, 30-word apology for "misspeaking," as if she had simply bungled some trivial sports score or box office tally, I am absolutely furious and I don't know what to do with myself."

Hillary Clinton's Response To Honduran Coup Was Scrubbed From Her Paperback Memoirs

Critics argue the secretary of state's efforts paved the way for the violence still plaguing Honduras

Roque Planas

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-honduras-coup-memoirs_us_56e34161e4b0b25c91820a08

Those who want to know what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said about Honduras' 2009 coup in her autobiography shouldn't bother with the paperback version.

Clinton's role in the aftermath of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya's ouster has come under greater scrutiny since the March 3 assassination of environmental and indigenous rights activist Berta Cáceres. Critics argue that the U.S. push for new elections in the months after the coup helped legitimize the actions of the Honduran military, destabilize the country and pave the way for the extreme violence that followed. Killings of activists like Cáceres and others have become devastatingly common.

But the account Clinton offered of her response to the coup in her memoir Hard Choices was omitted from last year's paperback edition.

In June 2009, Zelaya was overthrown by the Honduran military, ushered out of the presidential palace at gunpoint wearing only his pajamas. Months of protests against the de facto government led by Roberto Micheletti followed. While virtually all Latin American governments condemned the coup and called for Zelaya's restoration, Clinton and the U.S. pushed for elections to bring in a new government -- a position she detailed in the hardcover edition of Hard Choices, published in 2014.

Days after the coup, she wrote, she teamed up with Mexican Foreign Secretary Patricia Espinosa to come up with a response.

"We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot and give the Honduran people a chance to choose their own future," Clinton wrote.

But that paragraph -- indeed, the entire two-page discussion of the Honduran coup -- disappeared from the paperback edition. In the paperback version, the chapter on Latin America ends abruptly after a look at the debate over whether Cuba should be included in the Organization of American States.

It's a striking omission, given that Zelaya was overthrown just three weeks after Clinton's visit to Honduras for the OAS meeting at which Cuba's membership was debated, which she recounts as the penultimate anecdote of the Latin America chapter.

When asked about the edit, a Clinton spokeswoman pointed The Huffington Post to the front flap of the paperback edition, which notes generally that the text has been trimmed.

"A limited number of sections from the hardcover edition have been cut to accommodate a shorter length for this edition. Those sections remain available in the ebook edition," it says.

The omission, previously noted by writers including Belen Fernandez and Greg Grandin, seems more problematic since Cáceres' death last week. The high-profile activist was well known for opposing construction of the Agua Zarca Dam, which would have forced indigenous Lenca people to leave land they consider sacred. She was killed by unidentified gunmen after receiving a series of threats.

In the hardcover edition of her memoir, Clinton trumpets the resolution of the coup through a new round of elections as a triumph for regional diplomacy.

Honduras plunged into a period of extreme violence after the coup, as the de facto government suppressed protests with force. Even after a new elected president took office in early 2010, drug cartels exploited the confusion to solidify their control over trafficking routes to the U.S., and political violence made activism a deadly enterprise.

More than 100 environmental and land rights activists like Cáceres were killed in Honduras from 2010 to 2015, according to the British organization Global Witness. The country became the homicide capital of the world for several years, with a murder rate topping 90 per 100,000 at its peak in 2011, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

"Hillary [Clinton] and the State Department only wanted the kind of 'stability' that was convenient for them regardless of what was happening on the ground,” Cáceres' nephew Silvio Carrillo said in an email to HuffPost. "This has not changed today and it is the reason you now have had governments operating with impunity."

Asked about the omission of the coup passage from Clinton's memoir, Carrillo accused her of "attempting to scrub away the blood she's helped to spill along with the Department of Defense and the Department of State."

Cáceres herself cast blame on Clinton for legitimizing the coup after the fact by supporting new elections instead of pressing to restore the Zelaya administration, according to a 2014 video interview unearthed by New York University historian Greg Grandin.

"We were fighting a coup d'etat that we couldn't overcome," Cáceres said. "Those who overthrew the government are still there." She contended that in Hard Choices, Clinton was "practically saying what was going to happen in Honduras. This demonstrates a bad North American interference in our country."

Grandin, who wrote about Clinton's response to the 2009 coup in The Nation last week, told HuffPost that her work on Honduras should be a campaign issue and that the assassination of Cáceres should force a "reckoning with history."  

"They legitimated this coup regime," Grandin said. "The U.S. could have adopted a real multilateral position and joined with Brazil, for instance, in demanding the restoration of Zelaya."

Instead, the U.S. opted to sideline Zelaya and back elections that brought in a conservative government. "That's fairly clear between her emails and her own concession in Hard Choices. She took credit for that. Before she was called on it, she was holding it up as a signature achievement," he said.

The emails to which Grandin referred were made public last year and show that Clinton sought to avoid discussing the resolution of the Honduran coup at the

OAS, where many regional governments supported Zelaya's restoration, and instead pressed for the mediation she helped arrange in Costa Rica.

Clinton's director of Hispanic media, Jorge Silva, dismissed such criticism as "nonsense," according to Latino USA. Silva said that "Hillary Clinton engaged in active diplomacy that resolved a constitutional crisis and paved the way for legitimate democratic elections."

Before Her Assassination, Berta Cáceres Singled Out Hillary Clinton for Backing Honduran Coup