Gary Johnson is no libertarian purist. That's normal, for a serious candidate of a real party.

My friend Woody Wood, a textile lobbyist, and I were pondering our presidential choices. When we came to Johnson, he said he said something like, "Well, in a purely, perfectly, libertarian society,  . . . "

I can't tell you the rest of what he said, because it started me thinking -- we don't refuse to consider liberal or conservative candidates because of what we imagine pure liberalism, or pure conservatism, might be. Indeed hardly any of us even try to imagine those things, because they're so unlikely they're irrelevant. We vote for parties and candidates to move the ball in our preferred direction, not to go all the way with it. And sometimes our vote is more for the party, or for a particular wing of the party, than for our ideal candidate.

Johnson and Weld are pretty great candidates with a lot of experience in and out of government, but neither of them is libertarian on everything, any more than I am. But that means the Libertarian Party is maturing into a real, functioning, electoral political party, just when the Republican Party seems to have entered its second childhood -- OK, to be frank, it entered it somewhere around the Palin nomination and now with the Trump nomination its aging process has left the cute codger phase and gone into the nasty, belligerent, feces-flinging throes of full-blown senile dementia, the kind where you no longer recognize your friends and relations, and invest all your hope and trust into intimate, intricate imaginary relationships with strangers or people who don't even exist.

Anyhow, back to the serious candidates and parties. Jack Hunter spells out all the ways in which -- 

"Gary Johnson isn’t a perfect libertarian. Here’s why that doesn’t matter."

By Jack Hunter on rare.us