“What would you do about Aleppo?”.
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Johnson and Weld describe themselves as fiscally conservative, but say they appeal to young voters due to their views on social issues like same-sex marriage, abortion rights, gun rights and legalizing drugs like marijuana. When he got to the refugee crisis, Johnson interrupted him, saying, “OK, got it”.
Johnson caught his bearings with an “OK, got it”, but it was too late. He only needed a solid grounding in literature for some familiarity with Aleppo.
Johnson’s blunder was also mocked by Christopher Hill, a former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, but then Hill embarrassingly got confused and made the same error as the NYT by referring to Aleppo as the ISIS capital. And we don’t just mean the unseemly parts of Lolita.
By his Thursday afternoon appearance on Fox News, Johnson took another swing at proving he was well versed in the complexities of the war – and whiffed.
To make matters worse, New York Times editors realized the error and then changed it to “the stronghold of the Islamic State”, which was still wrong.
“He is really very much of a leader”, Trump said of a man who has overseen the murder of his domestic political opponents and critical journalists, the rigging of elections, a global campaign of disinformation and a foreign policy whose first aim is to increase Russian influence at us expense. He just didn’t answer the bell. In an interview with Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin, he said that he felt “horrible” about the question.
“In terms of Gary forgetting the word, I don’t know”.
The latest poll used by the presidential debate commission shows Johnson trailing far behind Clinton and Trump at 7 percent.
“This morning, I began my day by setting aside any doubt that I’m human”.
FILE – In this September 3, 2012 file photo, Syrians gather by the rubble of a house, destroyed from Syrian forces shelling, in the Syrian town of Azaz, on the outskirts of Aleppo, Syria.
“What is Aleppo?” Johnson asked during an interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”. But hit with ‘What about Aleppo?’, I immediately was thinking about an acronym, not the Syrian conflict. Do I understand its significance?
When pressed as to whether he was serious, Johnson indicated that he really was not aware of the city, which has been widely covered during the years that Syria has been engulfed in civil war. Currently, Johnson averages 10 percent in the five most recent national polls by NBC, CNN, CBS, ABC and Fox News.
Asked about his running mate’s flub, Weld told reporters it could have happened to anyone and that Johnson has been busy campaigning.
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“Probably 85 percent of the people in the country couldn’t put Aleppo on a map, so I’m not sure the outcome of the slip is going to be lasting at all”, Weld said. “It worked. That is what a President must do”, he wrote.
