Governor Johnson Was Right The First Time
This past week, I watched America’s best option for president in this
whole 2016 Farce get his character assassinated by the pompous self-serving members
of the media. The effect of this
character assassination was no different than if they shot him with real guns.
This was a bi-partisan assault.
Both liberal elitists in the so-called “Mainstream Media” and the
conservative and neo-conservative talk radio agitators openly and verbally assaulted
Governor Garry Johnson in the airwaves and through the Internet.
This character assassination started with a TV interview with Governor Gary
Johnson, presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party. Since the Narcissist Donald Trump and the
power-player Secretary Hillary Clinton had their pre-arranged “Command-in-Chief”
forum, MSNBC decided they were going to throw Johnson a bone and have his own
little panel discussion.
And then the panel threw Johnson a curve and asked him how he would
handle the situation with “Aleppo”.
“And what is Aleppo?” he asked.
That’s when the character assassination happened.
Pompous self-serving liberals in the media along with equally pompous
self-serving self-righteous so-called “political experts” howled in arrogant,
elitist rage at the governor’s lack of instantaneous knowledge of everything
concerning this city called “Aleppo”.
“How dare this amateur waste our time pretending he could be a serious
contender for President when he could not immediately and instantaneously know
what Aleppo is? Who does he think he is?”
And then the conservatives and neo-conservatives in the Trump-dominated
talk radio world began their verbal assault on Governor Johnson. “How dare.... how *dare* this ‘pretender’,
this whack-job, this fraud, think he can be a better president than Donald
Trump! He doesn’t know where Aleppo is
or what is going on there! Who does he
think he is stepping all over our party’s default lord and savior?!?”
Well, I’ll respond by way of a story.
When I went to college in New Hampshire, one of the first questions other
students asked me was where I was from, and I would always tell them I was from
Kingston.
“Oh, you’re from New York? You don’t
have the accent! You can’t be from New
York!”
“Oh, you’re from Massachusetts too?
Wow!”
“You mean Kingston in Ontario, Canada?”
“Kingston, in Georgia? Wow, you
got rid of that drawl pretty fast!”
“Jamaica? You don’t look it!”
Obviously, no, I didn’t come from Kingston, Jamaica. Or from Kingston, New York. Or Kingston, Ontario Canada. Or from Kingston in Georgia. Or even from Kingston, Massachusetts. I came from Kingston in New Hampshire; just a
half-hour drive away from the college.
I made the mistake of presuming that everyone I talked to knew that there
was a town in New Hampshire called Kingston, and that it was somehow different
from the towns in three other states and two other countries. And why not?
I mean, we had some serious rock concerts there, and we got some media notoriety
at one point through a nasty chemical waste dump that even caught the attention
of Reverend Jesse Jackson. (For those millennials who weren’t born yet, he was the “Black Lives
Matter” of the day.)
But if I were to attack those people over the “Kingston” gaffe in the
same way that the media and the fascist hacks in talk radio verbally assaulted
and character-assassinated Gary Johnson over Aleppo, I would have been pegged
as some pompous, elitist egomaniac that presumes the whole world should revolve
around me and my life. In other words, I’d
be like these so-called political “experts”.
Or at least a member of the West-Kardashian family.
And you know what? I would not
know what Aleppo is either if I was in his position and was just asked without
context!
Why should I? It’s a city on the
other side of the world from where I live and operate. They’re not taking money out of my pocket or
food out of my house. I’m certainly not
running for public office there. It’s a
no-win situation between religious extremists, a power-mad dictator, Russia,
and a whole bunch of refugees caught in the middle of it all that the
self-righteous fear-mongering bible-thumpers in two continents don’t want to
take in.
No, I don’t care about the modern-day “Napalm
Girl” photo of the traumatized boy in Syria. There is far too much trauma in the world
already for me to care. Too much “shock”
for me to be in “awe” over any of this.
By the way, thank you for that, President George W. Bush and your
neo-Roman imperium and your “War on Terror” world tour, now in its fifteenth
year of operation.
As far as I’m concerned, up until this whole character assassination,
Aleppo could’ve been in Libya, Kuwait, Iraq, Turkey, or even the country of
Georgia instead of Syria and I wouldn’t have known... unless someone said “Aleppo
in Syria”.
And there’s the rub. In any other
situation, members of the air-fluffed media would have taken that extra
half-second and reminded people that Aleppo was in Syria by simply saying “Aleppo
in Syria”. Just like they would have
said “Fallujah in Iraq”. But not for Governor
Johnson, who was brought in for a “kiddie table interview” following the
orchestrated “grown-up table” forum between Trump and Clinton that the rest of
the media covered.
Keep in mind as well that Governor Johnson never got a national security briefing
like Trump and Clinton did. Nobody
bothered to ask if he needed one like they automatically gave Trump and
Clinton. He wasn’t given updates like they
did over what’s going on in the world. He’s
been busy trying to raise money and trying get the public to recognize him
because he doesn’t have a billionaire sponsor.
He doesn’t have a Sheldon or a George to be his campaign sugar
daddy. He doesn’t have a pet cable
network to serve as his propaganda tool like Trump has with Fox News and
Clinton has with CNN and MSNBC. He isn’t
even getting any love from the Koch Brothers, and they own the libertarian-leaning
Reason Foundation!
And I’m going to go all-out and accuse the media of doing this on
purpose! They purposely and
intentionally baited Governor Johnson over this issue just so they could play “gotcha”
on him!
And how do I know this? Because
this is not the first time that they played that game with libertarians!
Twenty years ago, the media decided to start doing their “kiddie table”
debates after H. Ross Perot’s third-party inclusion in the 1992 presidential debates. The Libertarian Party candidate at the time
was the late Harry Browne, and as soon as Mister Browne made it clear that he
would end the failing “War on Drugs”, the CNN moderators immediately pounced on
it and let all the other candidates make it clear that they supported that
failing war and left Browne twisting in the wind.
“Oh look at that freak! He thinks
the War on Drugs has failed! What a
loser! Doesn’t he know that the script
tells us that it’s going strong?”
The end result was that Browne’s growing support waned, which was exactly
what was intended from CNN and their special-interest masters. They didn’t want another H. Ross Perot. They didn’t want another challenge to their
two-party dominance.
And today we’re seeing that all over again. Gary Johnson is baited into making a mistake,
the media pounce, the so-called “experts” declare him a failure, and the douchebag
hacks in the talk radio circuit follow up.
And all of it so their friends can shove Clinton and Trump up our anuses
and have us take it whether we like it or not.
Well let’s get brutally honest here... Governor Johnson was right the
first time when he said “And what is Aleppo?”
What is it? It’s a quagmire that
we’re being told that we “have” to get involved in. Why?
Because fifteen years ago we got traumatized as a nation and now we “have”
to jump to every crisis in the world on the pretense that it would somehow keep
us from being traumatized again. And all
so the chickenhawks in Congress and Fox News and talk radio can keep their war
machine erections and the goddamned military industrial complex can keep making
money at our expense.
And you really want to condemn Governor Johnson for that while you’re
busy reminding us of the continual failures of Trump and the continual blunders
of Clinton? Do you really want to harp
about that when the cons and neo-cons are spinning death-fantasy porn of
Hillary’s health and Trump is spinning on his own stances so fast that he could
generate his own gravity?
You know, Trump is right about one thing: the whole game is rigged! This is something I’ve known for twenty years
now. He was only wrong about who it’s
being rigged against. And *he* thinks he’s
not being treated fairly?!? He has *no idea*
what unfairness really is! But what do
you expect from a narcissistic #whinylittlebitch?
So if you’re still whining about a lack of alternatives, just remember
that the air-fluffed members of the media and the douchebags in Fox News and
talk radio just spend a lot of time shooting one of those alternatives down.
And they say that liberals and conservatives can’t work together!
