Matt Damon would ‘kiss George W. Bush on the mouth’ for work on AIDS

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.

“They would say, ‘America,’ and I was saying, ‘Yeah, our president did that, and it's terrific,’ ” Damon said. “You would have expected that Obama, with his reputation as a pragmatist, would look at PEPFAR, looked at how effective it is, and thought that he should make similar investments in other issues, definitely water and sanitation. Water and sanitation need their own PEPFAR,” he said.

Matt Damon, an Obama supporter during his first campaign, has publicly expressed disappointment with the president’s performance in office.

“If the Democrats think that they didn’t have a mandate — people are literally without any focus or leadership, just wandering out into the streets to yell right now because they are so pissed off,” Damon told Elle magazine last December. “Imagine if they had a leader.”

Obama responded to Damon’s disappointment at last year’s White House Correspondents' Association Dinner.

"Matt Damon said he was disappointed in my performance," Obama said. "Well, Matt, I just saw 'The Adjustment Bureau,' so right back at you, buddy."

Damon added during the interview with The Atlantic that he loves the Jobs Act, and despite his “disappointment” still doesn’t plan to vote for a Republican in November.

“Even with an Etch-a-Sketch move, that's still a lot of shaking you have to do,” he said, referring to a quote from a senior Mitt Romney adviser who suggested the presumptive Republican nominee could reset “like an Etch-a-Sketch” for the general election.

“I take issue with a few of the directions Obama has gone in,” Damon said. “When you run on something as vague as hope and change, I think a lot of people put their own s--- on you.”

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