{"id":13606,"date":"2012-02-17T09:01:51","date_gmt":"2012-02-17T14:01:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=13606"},"modified":"2012-02-17T09:01:51","modified_gmt":"2012-02-17T14:01:51","slug":"gary-johnson-is-the-candidate-that-the-left-once-hoped-barack-obama-would-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/02\/17\/gary-johnson-is-the-candidate-that-the-left-once-hoped-barack-obama-would-be\/","title":{"rendered":"Gary Johnson is &#8220;the candidate that the Left once hoped Barack Obama would be&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/inthesetimes.com\/article\/12741\/why_gary_johnson_should_terrify_the_democrats\/\">Theo Anderson<\/a> thinks that Gary Johnson is the candidate that should terrify the Democrats:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Gary Johnson is, in some important ways, the candidate that the Left once hoped Barack Obama would be. He vocally opposes the death penalty, the use of torture by the U.S. military, and the indefinite detention of people charged with a crime\u2013even suspects charged with terrorism.<\/p>\n<p>He\u2019s pro-choice. He calls for deep cuts in the defense budget and an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and from many of our military bases around the world. He unequivocally supports marriage rights for gays and believes that legalizing marijuana &mdash; rather than building a wall &mdash; is the key to solving illegal immigration. He also favors a two-year grace period for immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally, so that they can obtain work visas and continue living and working here.<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>What\u2019s striking about Johnson isn\u2019t just the fact that he\u2019s to the left of Obama and most other elected Democrats on many issues. It\u2019s also his boldness in comparison with the Democrats\u2019 timidity. He\u2019s been a fierce critic, for example, of the warmongering and civil-liberties abuses by both major parties over the past decade. In January, when he spoke the ACLU\u2019s National Staff Conference, he called for repeal of the Patriot Act.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTen years ago,\u201d he said, \u201cwe learned that the fastest way to pass a bad law is to call it the \u2018Patriot Act\u2019 and force Congress to vote on it in the immediate wake of a horrible attack on the United States. The irony is that there is really very little about the Patriot Act that is patriotic. Instead, it has turned out to be yet another tool the government is using to erode privacy, individual freedom and the Constitution itself.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Theo Anderson thinks that Gary Johnson is the candidate that should terrify the Democrats: Gary Johnson is, in some important ways, the candidate that the Left once hoped Barack Obama would be. He vocally opposes the death penalty, the use of torture by the U.S. military, and the indefinite detention of people charged with a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,10,28,53,13],"tags":[188,728,550],"class_list":["post-13606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-liberty","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-electionwatch","tag-garyjohnson","tag-libertarianism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3xs","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13606"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13607,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13606\/revisions\/13607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}