While Presidential candidate Gary Johnson did give his word to stay sober from marijuana throughout the election process, he just may have been hitting the bong before joining MSNBC's "Morning Joe" panel this morning. Here is how the conversation went when host Mike Barnicle asked about the crisis in Syria's largest city and at the epicenter of the country’s civil war and refugee crisis:
BARNICLE: What would you do, if you were elected, about Aleppo?
JOHNSON: About?
BARNICLE: Aleppo.
JOHNSON: And what is Aleppo?
BARNICLE: You’re kidding.
JOHNSON: No.
BARNICLE: Aleppo is in Syria. It’s the — it’s the epicenter of the refugee crisis.
JOHNSON: OK, got it, got it.
BARNICLE: OK.
JOHNSON: Well, with regard to Syria, I do think that it’s a mess. I think that the only way that we deal with Syria is to join hands with Russia to diplomatically bring that at an end. But when we’ve aligned ourselves with — when we’ve supported the opposition of the Free Syrian Army — the Free Syrian Army is also coupled with the Islamists.
And then the fact that we’re also supporting the Kurds and this is — it’s just — it’s just a mess. And that this is the result of regime change that we end up supporting. And, inevitably, these regime changes have led a less-safe world.
While this type of response is not surprising coming from Johnson, who appears to be high as a kite during the majority of interviews he gives, it is absurd coming from a nominee for the office of president of the United States. The fact that Johnson could show only minimal knowledge of Syria's dangerous and tragic circumstance should be alarming, and that was ONLY after being informed of what Syria's most highly populated city even was.Throughout his campaign, Johnson has continued to trot out one anti-libertarian idea after the other, all in an effort to convince Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump dissenters that he is the right choice for America. There's only one problem with that: He is not a Libertarian, and neither is his running mate, Bill Weld. With the definition of Libertarianism being "an extreme laissez-faire political philosophy advocating only minimal state intervention in the lives of citizens," the Johnson-Weld ticket is the least Libertarian in terms of ideology.
In true Libertarian fashion (not), Johnson and his running mate Bill Weld have previously come out in favor of publicly funding private organization Planned Parenthood, depriving citizens of their due process by banning those on the terror watch list from owning guns, and even equating a photographer using their religious freedom and freedom of association to refuse to participate in a gay wedding with murdering someone for religious reasons, saying "Why shouldn't somebody be able to shoot somebody else because their freedom of religion says that God has spoken to them and that they can shoot somebody dead?" Johnson even said he agrees with "73 percent" of Bernie Sanders's platform, who is a literal socialist.
The admiration for Sanders-like mathematics was evident during Johnson's tenure as governor of New Mexico. Johnson continuously boasts about balancing New Mexico's budget, but, as pointed out by National Review's James Spiller, that is not a full truth. When Johnson took the helm as governor of New Mexico in 1995, the budget stood at $4.397 billion, and when he left in 2003, it had grown to $7.721 billion, which was an increase of 7.29 percent a year. Spiller explains Johnson's misleading comments this way:
"Johnson also claims to have balanced the budget every year, but what he means by this is that he complied with the New Mexico constitution, which as a practical matter prohibits operational spending deficits. New Mexico’s debt is required to be off the books, or at least off those books, in a separate “capital outlay” budget. This means that of course his operating budgets were balanced; New Mexico makes the alternative impossible. The capital outlays are considered “balanced” if it is believed that they can likely be paid for in the future, and rosy assumptions are permitted. It’s as if you or I claimed to be debt-free because our current account, which does not allow for overdrafts, had no overdrafts, despite our taking out ever more maxed-out credit cards and making minimum payments on each. In the sense that Johnson says he balanced the budgets, every president and Congress in history has passed balanced federal budgets 100 percent of the time."
Johnson is currently polling at 9% (according to a RealClearPolitics average), which falls below the required 15% needed to appear in the presidential debates. While the likelihood of a 3rd party nominee achieving success in this year's election remain minimal, this was an important opportunity for Johnson, as is any time a third party candidate can get national television exposure. He certainly won't find his poll numbers rising after today. So, while it would be interesting to see Gary Johnson light up a joint on stage with Hillary and Trump, the likelihood of that happening is quickly deteriorating. He could still garner some attention by calling Trump a "p***y" again, but even then, his chances are most likely up in smoke.
