I Call Shenanigans

On Gary Johnson. Today at The Daily Beast, he tries to walk back his statement that as president he would sign a law banning burqas in the United States.

Well, I don't blame him. But down in that piece, we find this:

"I gave Reason the honest kneejerk response and if I’m wrong, I’m wrong"

Kneejerk? Response?

Bullshit.

If it was a kneejerk response to Reason, how did this end up in Politico?

Johnson's views can be hard to pigeonhole. He told POLITICO that he would support a ban on burqas because he believes they are forced under sharia law, not a symbol of religious freedom.

"We need to understand the difference between freedom of religion -- which is absolutely guaranteed and I would fervently defend," Johnson said. "Sharia law is politics, it's not religion. If you say that a woman is voluntarily going to be of lesser value than a man, which is in sharia law, can we allow that?"

And how did this end up in the Albuquerque, New Mexico Journal?

Interestingly, the longtime opponent of interventionist foreign policy and proponent of personal freedoms said he would support banning burqas that cover Islamic women's entire faces. Johnson said Islamic Sharia law doesn't condemn violence against women, and burqas allow women to hide facial injuries.

"We need to separate Sharia law, which is politics, and Islam, which is religion," Johnson said.

"Response?" Who believes that three different publications all chose the same day, the day of his campaign announcement, to ask him "so, Gary, how would you feel about legislation banning burqas?"

And even in some kind of bizarre alternative universe where being asked that three different times by three different journalists on one single day when the issue was on nobody's mind except maybe his was more than perhaps a one in a trillion possibility, how is giving the same basic response to those three journalists "kneejerk?"

It wasn't kneejerk and it wasn't a response. It was on his mind and he wanted to talk about it.

He wanted to dog whistle to Donald Trump's supporters.

And apparently he thought that libertarians (and Libertarians) either wouldn't notice or wouldn't care.

Those last two sentences constitute two entirely independent layers of "what the fuck, Gary?" on top of the idiotic policy position statement.