Mark Halperin caught Gary Johnson after his interview on Morning Joe where he didn’t know what Aleppo was, and he asked Johnson about it:
Instead of calling it a gotcha question or some other deflection, Johnson said he was incredibly frustrated with himself about his answer and that he’s just got to get smarter.
Johnson even agreed that it should be a big flap.
As Sooper suggested, at least Johnson is honest about his flub and isn’t trying to play off the significance of it. And I must say there’s something attractive about a candidate who flubs it real good and then owns the flub. That’s not something we see very often at this level of politics.
That said, he should have at least known that Aleppo was a city in Syria. It’s not, however, the capital of ISIS as one politician tried to suggest this morning while attacking Johnson. That would be Raqqa. Rather, Aleppo has been a rebel stronghold that the Syrian Government has been fighting hard to take back in the last few months.