Gary Johnson: The United States And ISIS Are Pretty Much the Same

Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson reacts as his microphone stops working during a campaign rally, Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016, at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. (AP Photo/Scott Morgan)

I know a lot of RedStaters are, when faced with the utter dog’s breakfast of choices available on November 8, planning to vote for Gary Johnson. And there is a lot of talk about the Libertarian Party, and I swear to Heaven I am not making this up, being a logical home for conservatives. But please think again.

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Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party presidential nominee, drew a parallel on Wednesday between the Syrian government’s targeting of noncombatants in that nation’s civil war and the accidental bombing of civilians by United States-backed forces.

Attacking Hillary Clinton over what he criticized as her overly interventionist instincts, Mr. Johnson pointed to the hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians killed by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, as well as civilian deaths caused by the American-backed coalition, and said Mrs. Clinton, the former secretary of state, bore at least partial responsibility.

But when pressed four times on whether he saw a moral equivalence between deaths caused by the United States, directly or indirectly, and mass killings of civilians by Mr. Assad and his allies, Mr. Johnson made clear that he did.

“Well no, of course not — we’re so much better than all that,” Mr. Johnson, a former New Mexico governor, said sarcastically. “We’re so much better when in Afghanistan, we bomb the hospital and 60 people are killed in the hospital.”

It seems that in Gary Johnson’s world view there is no difference between the driver of an 18-wheeler who kills someone in an interstate pile-up and a Muslim terrorist that drives a truck into a crowd.

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There are lots of very, very good reasons to oppose the Biblical level of stupidity that Obama is undertaking in Syria. Seriously. We are in the position of considering air strikes on our nominal allies, because Assad’s Syria and Russia are allies and we are supposed to be allied with Russia, and we are arming and training al Qaeda fighters to attack our nominal allies who are being reinforced by Iran which has kidnapped US sailors. But to say the accidental bombing of a hospital is the same as the violence carried out by either Assad or the people we’re arming is a profoundly stupid statement and shows that Gary Johnson is even less a serious candidate than Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. If fact, his rhetoric puts him on the Clown-o-matic Scale right next to Jill Stein.

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