MSNBC's Brzezinski: Huckabee "Honest," "Charming," And "Authentic"

On the December 10 edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe, while discussing the controversy surrounding Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's 1992 statements about AIDS, co-host Mika Brzezinski praised Huckabee for being "charming," "authentic," and "honest." She further said that the way he's handling the controversy surrounding the statements, which he made on a 1992 Associated Press candidate questionnaire during his bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Arkansas, is "brilliant" and predicted that "his response to" the controversy is "going to be effective in a positive way." According to the AP, in 1992, Huckabee wrote on the 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." But in purporting to explain that comment, he recently claimed that he "didn't say that we should quarantine" AIDS patients, and he has asserted that "[t]here was still so much confusion about HIV transmission" at the time he made the statements in question. In fact, as several news outlets pointed out, by 1992, it was widely known that AIDS could not be transmitted via casual contact.

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