News

Fox Business host blames pot for Johnson’s Aleppo gaffe

by Jesse Byrnes - 09/09/16 2:49 PM ET

Fox Business host Stuart Varney on Friday floated one possible explanation for Gary Johnson blanking when asked about Aleppo, Syria, this week: Johnson has smoked too much pot.

“Gary Johnson is a lifelong pot smoker. He’s been smoking too much. He blanked because he’s been smoking too much weed,” Varney said Friday on his program “Varney & Co.”

{mosads}John Stossel, a libertarian commentator and Fox Business host, pushed back, defending the Libertarian presidential nominee following his gaffe on Thursday, when he asked, “What is Aleppo?”

Johnson’s response shocked the MSNBC hosts interviewing him, who remarked on Syria’s largest city being central in coverage of the country’s ongoing conflict and refugee crisis.

“A lot of people smoke weed and don’t do that, and a lot of people go blank who never take anything,” Stossel said. “He’s just a low-key kind of guy, that’s his style. I don’t know.”

“It came out of nowhere,” Stossel said of the question posed to Johnson during his interview Thursday morning on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” adding of Johnson, “He knows what Aleppo is.”

Still, Stossel insisted, “I’d rather have a president who doesn’t know what Aleppo is over one who wants to invade Syria.”

Johnson, who said in June that he had stopped using marijuana while running for president, has sought to clean up his Thursday gaffe that punctured his push to get on the presidential debate stages, which 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney came out in support of the night before.

“Yes, I understand the dynamics of the Syrian conflict — I talk about them every day. But hit with ‘What about Aleppo?’, I immediately was thinking about an acronym, not the Syrian conflict. I blanked. It happens, and it will happen again during the course of this campaign,” Johnson said.

Varney remarked on his program Friday that, at least on broadcast media, “I’ve not heard anybody speculate about Johnson’s lifelong use of marijuana” as an explanation for the gaffe.

Tags 2016 presidential election Gary Johnson