Bill Kristol and (a) Bush Looking Libertarian for a Place to Vote
On his Twitter feed today, neocon thought leader Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard thinks out loud about voting for Gary Johnson, while acknowledging he doesn't like what he knows of his relatively non-interventionist foreign policy (though most of the world would be relatively non-interventionist to Kristol, who actually lauds being proudly "pro-war" as a core part of his version of Republican identity).
The best thing Kristol had to say was that "a vote for [Johnson] is a symbolic vote for the Constitution and against both demagogic authoritarianism and demagogic nanny statism."
Others on the neocon right are happy to just go straight to Hillary Clinton with their support.
I should hope that Johnson would be resistant to the siren call of trying to satisfy Bill Kristol with his foreign policy commitments, and in the Trump age it's clear Kristol commands few (metaphorical or literal, luckily) armies in our mighty nation, but it's an interesting sign of a political scene on the right in chaos nonetheless.
And while neither none of the major politicians named Bush have yet been bold enough to do so, despite obvious dislike for Republican candidate Donald Trump, Bush brother Marvin did come out openly for Gary Johnson on a D.C. sports radio call-in show, as Buzzfeed reports:
"That's why I'm voting libertarian, 100%, these two guys—and nobody knows about them, people think it is sort of a wasted vote—but, both Gary Johnson and Bill Weld were each successful two term governors who balanced their budgets," Bush said. "So they're fiscally conservative and their essential message is get bureaucracy off our backs. It used to be a part of what the Republicans believed."
"I want to have a conscience," added Bush regarding his inability to vote Trump. "I want proven effective people running this country and so, I want to be able to go to bed at night and so I don't really care about that."
