It’s weird to hear a politician own up to a gaffe, wrote Matt Welch.
One week later, Politico asserted, with the Trumply sourced “a handful of polls,” each of which was left unsourced but in fact belonged to the disjointed, unreliable Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, that Mister Johnson had encroached upon Hillary Clinton’s lead.
It started with Johnson’s “What is Aleppo?” The absurdity of the situation, and its ensuing reaction can be found in the Huffington Post’s compilation of reaction tweets declaring an end to Johnson’s run, and the surge in his social media popularity that followed. His likes doubled in the week following the ignorant comment.
Taking all this into account, after months and years of Hillary Clinton’s inability to not do what was not her job in the first place in regards to emails and Trump’s bizarre take on accounting, race, international relations, and the viability of his daughter as a sexual partner, it seems now would be the perfect time for the universe to look the American public in the eye and say:
Shut up.
This is the same American public which promoted a self-proclaimed billionaire to the forefront of American politics; a billionaire with a bizarre history bankruptcy, fraud, and the hiring of illegal immigrants, promoted past a Trumpety handful of viable candidates largely on the support of broke, uneducated rural voters with a wistful notion of Robespierre’s revolution. And they’ve forgotten, it seems, that Robespierre lost his head.
And now, without a hint of irony, this public and its media have taken to attacking a moderately successful politician suffering from momentary brain freeze, while the leading Republican nominee is supported by a former presidential contender who can’t seem to find his luggage.
What makes the entire scenario so ludicrous is not the outcry against Gary Johnson. The Libertarian party - certainly a more viable option than Jill Stein and her ludicrous, self-aggrandizing media campaign (to call it a presidential campaign would be far too complimentary) - holds at current forty-three partisan offices. The Green party has garnered exactly zero electoral votes in the last twenty years and five elections, and held only forty-eight partisan offices in a twenty-five year period. The GP’s own website ends the partisan count in 2003.
Should the American public hold more confidence in Jill Stein’s party than the GP’s own web developer?
And can an American public, which has nominated a brandable buffoon and reality star (for surely reality stars are the new royalty; Robespierre would have a field day) famously incapable of apology, by the name of Donald Trump, as one of its two representatives to the global population, mock a two-time governor for one television mishap?
Can it? Yes. But it must be prepared to shut itself up, particularly when the guillotine falls.
By Luka McAuley
