Monthly Archives: September 2016

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Election 2016: It’s a Presidential Campaign, Not a Geography Quiz

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Former Gov. Gary Johnson
Gary Johnson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On September 8, Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, where panelist Mike Barnicle hit him with the question:

“What would you do if you were elected about Aleppo?”

Johnson: “About?”

Barnicle: “Aleppo.”

Johnson: “And what is a leppo?”

Barnicle: “You’re kidding.”

Johnson: “No.”

Maybe you’ve heard about this exchange. Maybe you know (or maybe you Googled and found out) that Aleppo is the largest city in Syria and a focal point of the war between Syria’s government and Islamic State rebels.

Be warned: If you listened to MSNBC’s “expert” on Syria, or read the New York Times account of Johnson’s “faux pas,” you got bad scoop. They didn’t know much about Aleppo either, inaccurately describing the city as the Islamic State’s “capital” (that’s Raqqa, not Aleppo).

My gut feeling is that the average American will come down on Johnson’s side of this teapot tempest, for two reasons.

First, most Americans likely know little if anything about Aleppo and don’t care to, so they can probably sympathize. Johnson’s foreign policy focus as a presidential candidate is “big picture.” He wants the US to stop militarily intervening everywhere around the world at the drop of a hat. He doesn’t have to know the name of every city in the world to know that he doesn’t want to bomb them.

Secondly, the question was transparently framed as an ambush. Barnicle’s obvious intent was to try and get a Dan Quayle or George W. Bush type howler or malapropism out of Johnson.

Any TV talking head who queried Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump on the subject would do so roughly as follows:

“Moving on to Syria: If elected, what is your plan to address the civil war there, destroy ISIS and bring peace to the region? And what do you think of reports of new chemical attacks in the country’s largest city, Aleppo, where fighting between regime forces and ISIS has flared up again?”

Not: “What would you do if you were elected about Aleppo?”

To Johnson’s credit, he quickly owned up to and apologized for his knowledge gap in the area of Syrian geography. But he shouldn’t have had to, because he shouldn’t have been asked that question in that exceedingly unprofessional manner.

Running for president is not a geography quiz.

And Morning Joe isn’t — or at least shouldn’t be — an arm of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, charged with helping her regain traction among voters who have abandoned her for third party candidates because of her demonstrated personal corruption and incompetence, not to mention her dangerous foreign policy belligerence.

Yes, Clinton knows where Aleppo is — and she’d turn the city of more than two million into a lifeless crater given the opportunity.

Is Johnson all that and a bag of chips? Maybe not. But at least his ideas on foreign policy and military adventurism don’t constitute an existential threat to the US and to humanity. The same can’t be said for the ideas of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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DEA Declares (Kr)atomic War on Americans

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Typical powdered commercial Kratom, Mitragyna ...
Typical powdered commercial Kratom, Mitragyna speciosa. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In early August, the US Drug Enforcement Administration announced that, contrary to expectations, it wouldn’t remove marijuana from “Schedule 1” (“no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse”).

At the end of the month, DEA made another announcement: It intends to add another herbal substance, kratom, to Schedule 1.

Why is the DEA picking on kratom? The agency offers numerous excuses — insufficient testing for the plant to have an approved medical use, its historical use as an opium substitute,  its increasing use “to self-treat chronic pain and opioid withdrawal symptoms, with users reporting its effects to be comparable to prescription opioids.”

DEA says that last bit like it’s a bad thing. It isn’t. Pain relief is a GOOD thing. I’ve tried kratom myself for chronic back pain. I used it once, and got several days of (admittedly subjective) pain relief. The next time, not as much. I assume there was a difference of purity/strength involved. My pain turned out to be neuropathic and treatable with non-opioid medication. Otherwise I’d probably have continued to experiment with kratom.

Every day we’re warned of an “epidemic” of “prescription drug abuse” — mostly of opioids. Along comes a fairly benign herbal substance that helps with withdrawal from such drugs and with the chronic pain that the patient was probably taking them for in the first place, and DEA wants to ban it.

Yes, I said “fairly benign.” DEA claims to have identified 15 “kratom-related” deaths in the US over the last two years, but doesn’t claim kratom as the actual CAUSE of those deaths. While my research has admittedly been minimal, I’ve yet to find so much as a single documented report of a “kratom-related” death in which other drugs were not also present.

When you have to ask why, the answer is usually “money.” The case of DEA versus kratom is no exception to the rule.

The Drug Enforcement Administration employs more than 10,000 people (nearly 5,000 of them “special agents”) and sports a budget of more than $2 billion per year. The organization’s mission statement is fairly long and convoluted and manages to leave out the real main mission: Keeping those jobs and increasing that budget.

How long has that been the mission? For a century or so. The Drug Enforcement Administration was once known as the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which in turn was a remnant of the Bureau of (alcohol) Prohibition, created for the express purpose of allowing former booze-busters to continue collecting government paychecks.

The only thing the DEA “protects” America from is the threat of having to compete with laid-off tax parasites for jobs in the productive sector.

With the war on marijuana winding down, DEA is on the lookout for new scary stories it can tell to taxpayers so we won’t object when politicians continue to throw money at DEA. Cue the kratom “threat.”

The real threat is DEA and other government agencies whose employees are willing to condemn Americans to pain, sickness, imprisonment, even death, rather than find real jobs.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Hillary Clinton, Servergate, and the Steve Martin Defense

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English: Hillary Clinton takes oath-of-office ...
English: Hillary Clinton takes oath-of-office as United States Secretary of State. Bill Clinton also pictured. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Two simple words in the English language” should be a sufficient defense against charges of tax evasion or armed robbery, says Steve Martin in a routine captured on his 1979 standup album Comedy is Not Pretty! The two words? “I forgot.”

Some jokes are funny because they reveal uncomfortable truths. Other jokes, like the “I forgot” routine, tickle our funny bones because they’re absurd. Nobody could possibly get away with armed robbery by informing the judge “I forgot armed robbery was illegal” in the real world, right?

If Hillary Clinton worked in comedy instead of in politics, she’d probably be in court right now defending a suit for stealing Martin’s gag. But she’s no comedienne. She apparently put up the Steve Martin defense with a straight face when questioned by the FBI, as revealed in newly released documents.

The subject: Why, as US Secretary of state, she ignored the briefings she received on handling and safeguarding of classified information, choosing to illegally use a private server for transmission and storage of that information instead of following the rules.

The FBI reports:

“Clinton stated … she did not recall receiving any guidance from State regarding e-mail policies outlined in the State FAM [Foreign Affairs Manual].”

“When asked, Clinton recalled being briefed on [Special Access Programs] information but could not recall any specific briefing on how to handle SAP information.”

“Clinton could not recall any briefing or training by State related to the retention of federal records or handling of classified information.”

Why couldn’t she remember these things?

“[I]n December of 2012, Clinton suffered a concussion and then around the New Year had a blood clot …. Based on her doctor’s advice, she could only work at State for a few hours a day and could not recall every briefing she received.”

The “I forgot” defense is admittedly a new and novel explanation for Clinton’s actions. But I’m not sure it’s a very good one, given her specific personal situation. The possibilities break down to two:

One possibility is that Clinton is a lying felon who, either intentionally or with reckless negligence, compromised classified information which was entrusted to her care, and who knew she could successfully play the “I forgot card” to forestall prosecution because she is Hillary Clinton.

The other possibility is that Clinton suffers from a traumatic brain injury which negatively affects her ability to remember important things. Things like, say, “when meeting with the Russian ambassador, don’t let him play with the briefcase that contains the nuclear strike codes.”

Do either of these possibilities — and remember, they could BOTH be true! — strike you as a strong advertisement for Hillary Clinton’s credibility and qualifications as a candidate for president of the United States?

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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