Richard Gere stunned fellow liberals Monday by suggesting that President Bush is doing a better job of fighting AIDS than President Bill Clinton did.
Introduced by Sharon Stone at a fund-raiser at Cipriani 42nd Street for the American Foundation for AIDS Research, the "Chicago" star hailed Bush for his State of the Union proposal to contribute $15 billion toward the AIDS battle in Africa and the Caribbean. Gere then addressed the track record of Bush's predecessor in the White House.
"I'm sorry, Sen. [Hillary] Clinton, but your husband did nothing about AIDS for eight years," Gere said.
By that point, Sen. Clinton, who joined Mayor Bloomberg and honorees Anna Wintour and Lorne Michaels at the event, had left the restaurant. But a spokeswoman for the senator said yesterday that Gere's claim was "simply not true. The Clinton administration increased funding for AIDS research, prevention and treatment by over 400% and tripled funding for international AIDS programs."
Meanwhile, veteran Clinton-basher Christopher Hitchens is suggesting that the former President was a CIA informant at Oxford University, where the two were students in the late 1960s.
"I think he was a double," the author of "No One Left to Lie To" claims in the latest issue of the conservative quarterly Doublethink. "Somebody was giving information to [the CIA] about the antiwar draft resisters, and I think it was probably him."
Clinton's spokesman Jim Kennedy declined to comment on Hitchens' spy story.
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