Story highlights Matt Welch: After gaffes, is Gary Johnson qualified for presidency?

He says unserious media spent a couple news cycles making hay over Johnson gotcha question

Welch: In two-party system, candidates still measured on mannerisms, not substance of ideas

Matt Welch is editor-it-large for Reason and co-author of "The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America" (Public Affairs). The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) Is Gary Johnson qualified to run for president? Let's talk about that, but first let's talk about this:

Two weeks ago, the foreign affairs select committee of the British House of Commons released a detailed, damning report about one of Hillary Clinton's signature achievements as secretary of state: The 2011 US/UK/French-led military intervention into Moammar Gadhafi's Libya, which was sold as a necessity to prevent (in President Barack Obama's words ) "a massacre that would have reverberated across the region."

"This policy," the conservative-led committee concluded, "was not informed by accurate intelligence. In particular, the [British] Government failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element. By the summer of 2011, the limited intervention to protect civilians had drifted into an opportunist policy of regime change. That policy was not underpinned by a strategy to support and shape post-(Gadhafi) Libya. The result was political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of (Gadhafi) regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL in North Africa."

You might think that a deeply sourced report from an allied government about trumped-up intelligence leading to yet another destabilizing Middle East war might make some headlines in the country where the administration's leading proponent of said intervention is poised to become the next leader of the free world.

But you would be wrong.

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