MSNBC Guest Rips Johnson for Getting It Wrong on Aleppo and Gets it Wrong on Aleppo

September 9th, 2016 12:41 PM

It was just a matter of time before the piling-on from denizens of MSNBC's Morning Joe after Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson's goofy Aleppo gaffe caught up with someone else on the show.

Johnson drew a blank in response to Morning Joe regular Mike Barnicle's gotcha question, a flub that quickly went viral and dominated discussion during the rest of Thursday's broadcast.

MSNBC even dispatched With All Due Respect co-host Mark Halperin to corner Johnson in the lobby immediately after his appearance on Morning Joe, with Johnson conceding that he was "incredibly frustrated with myself." The ridicule of Johnson continued after that, led by Barnicle and co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, and with NBC foreign correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin and Politico foreign affairs reporter Michael Crowley also getting in their digs.

The crowing took a comic detour, however, when Christopher Hill, former US ambassador to Iraq, joined in the fun and quickly showed how such a gaffe can so easily occur -- because he did likewise --

SCARBOROUGH: One of our favorites, Ambassador Christopher Hill. Ambassador Hill, I would ask you how depressed you were by some of the comments from last night's (commander-in-chief) forum but I think we need to start with the depressing developments on this show earlier this morning where you have a major party candidate who may draw enough votes from one of the two candidates to actually shape the outcome of this election. Gary Johnson, when asked by Mike Barnicle, what he thought about Aleppo, asked the question, what is Aleppo? What's your reaction to that?

HILL: I'm still trying to get my mind around that one. You know, foreign affairs, there's a lot of inside baseball that I don't expect people to understand or follow, but the capital of ISIS, very much in the news, especially in the last two days, but for the last two years. And for him to draw that kind of blank -- and by the way, was that a blank stare on his face. I was wondering whether he was talking about something called an aleppo and was he confused by that. I couldn't figure it out, it was just mind-blowing. I don't know where he will have peaked in the polls but I think that he will now be known as Aleppo Johnson and that may be the end of their bid.

BRZEZINSKI: Yeah, I mean, I'm sort of uncomfortable. I think the part of this that, uh, seems a little bit unfair is that the Republican nominee seems to make statements like, similar to that.

As did, like, the Morning Joe guest who just spoke, when he confused Aleppo, a major city in northern Syria that's become -- in Barnicle's words, the "epicenter of the refugee crisis" -- with the actual ISIS capital of Raqqa. Which is more mind-blowing: an isolationist former governor getting this wrong -- or a former ambassador to Iraq, dean of international studies at the University of Denver, and (as Hill touts in his Twitter bio), "4 time ambassador & A/S of State for East Asia/Pacific Affairs"?

Hill wasn't the only presence on the NYC media scene left with egg on his face from responding to Johnson's error. Over at the New York Times, the paper was forced to run a correction -- and then an awkward correction of its initial correction -- in its story about Johnson flubbing Barnicle's query --

Correction: September 8, 2016
An earlier version of this article misidentified the de facto capital of the Islamic State. It is Raqqa, in northern Syria, not Aleppo.

Correction: September 8, 2016
An earlier version of the above correction misidentified the Syrian capital as Aleppo. It is Damascus.

What the corrections helped establish is that Christopher Hill is clearly a source for the New York Times, at least when it comes to Syrian geography.

Quickly after the Johnson/Aleppo story with its correction for the correction, the paper helpfully ran another story with this classic Times headline -- 'What is Aleppo?' Gary Johnson asked. Let us explain.