While the political establishment has traditionally viewed libertarians along the lines of loons and lepers they are about to be welcomed in from the cold as a last ditch effort to derail the Trump express. The holiday weekend has now passed along with Never Trumper neocon wingnut William Kristol’s much anticipated third party candidate announcement so it looks as though former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson is going to be the man. Johnson emerged from the often bizarre carnival of perversion that was the Libertarian Party convention just held in Orlando and will team with former Massachusetts governor – what is it with these guys? – William Weld to form what is hoped to be a legitimate threat to poach votes from Donald Trump come November.

CNN reports that “Libertarians pick ticket, slam Trump”:

Libertarians on Sunday selected a presidential ticket headed by former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, who lit into presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump on immigration and a range of other issues.

At the party convention in Orlando, Florida, Johnson got his preferred running mate, former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, in a weekend gathering that drew sharp contrasts with the major party candidates — Trump and Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee.

Johnson described the real estate mogul’s immigration policies as “just racist,” particularly the Republican’s call to deport 11 million undocumented people currently in the country.

Libertarian activists contend their ticket could play a pivotal role in the 2016 campaign, with Trump and Clinton both viewed unfavorably by large swaths of the electorate. Even grabbing a small percentage of the vote in key states could affect the Electoral College calculus.

Trump was a frequent target of criticism of many Libertarians at the weekend convention. In addition to immigration participants particularly took issue with Trump’s stated positions on international trade and national security — all of which stand in firm opposition to a party that tends to favor lax immigration restrictions, free trade and is skeptical of military intervention. Austin Petersen, one of the presidential candidates who lost to Johnson, called Trump a fascist, a term regularly echoed throughout the convention.

Weld had garnered headlines earlier when he compared Trump’s immigration plan to the anti-Semitic Nazi pogrom Kristallnacht, a stupid and insensitive comparison that would ordinarily end political careers but the rules are different whenever it’s an attack on the billionaire outsider who has terrified the establishment. Interestingly enough the flaming liberal Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) seems to have been rather silent on Weld’s offensive comment despite going after Trump with  hammer and tong by trying to link him to white supremacist David Duke a few months ago. Double standards are now the norm when it comes to Trump and his critics.

Neither Johnson nor Weld are traditional libertarians but rather establishment Republican opportunists who are looking to cash in off the anti-Trump mania and if they get their way, put Hillary Clinton into the White House.