Arnold Schwarzenegger says Libertarian presidential nominee Gary JohnsonGary JohnsonFox Business host blames pot for Johnson’s Aleppo gaffe Schwarzenegger: Put Libertarians in debates The Hill’s 12:30 Report MORE and his running mate Bill Weld belong in the debates.
Advertisement
“And what is Aleppo?”.
The Libertarian Party nominee for president disqualified himself to be Commander-in-Chief when he asked “What is Aleppo?” on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”.
“What is Aleppo?” Johnson said when asked on MSNBC how, as president, he would address the refugee crisis in the war-torn Syrian city.
In Syria, he said, Washington needs “to join hands with Russian Federation to diplomatically bring that at an end” and the Free Syrian Army rebels the USA has been supporting are “coupled with the Islamists”.
A Washington Post-Survey Monkey poll released Wednesday found that Johnson, who is hardly ever included in presidential polling, is supported by an average of 13 per cent across all states. Romney, a leading Republican critic of Trump, stopped short of endorsing the Libertarian ticket.
He also compared Trump’s campaign to Big Brother in George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” and said unlike Trump, he and Johnson would fly the GOP banner “without the mean-spiritedness”. Genuinely – believe me, no one is taking this more seriously than me.
But the exchange yesterday morning instantly thrust the former New Mexico governor under a global spotlight, with #WhatIsAleppo a trending hashtag and a red-faced Johnson scrambling to fend off suggestions he is a foreign-policy amateur.
“I understand its importance”.
“You can find Aleppo on a map”, she said.
Many who attended today’s rally, however, said Johnson’s misstep did not affect their willingness to vote for him in a contest that has been defined by, among other things, Donald’s Trump’s controversial comments about Muslims, women, and Mexican immigrants.
While you and the rest of the media community were so busy freaking out about how a non-interventionist didn’t know what a non-capital city thousands of miles away was, you missed something that Gary Johnson said that was quite important…a game changer really. “Well, no, I do understand Aleppo, and I understand the crisis that is going on”, he said. But I succeeded by surrounding myself with the right people, getting to the bottom of important issues, and making principled decisions. “I think that can happen to anybody”. “It worked. That is what a President must do”, he wrote.
Johnson later apologized in a statement, saying he was thinking of an acronym, not the Syrian city.
Advertisement
He acknowledged again on ABC’s The View that he had made a mistake.
