Libertarian presidential candidate and former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson went on MSNBC’sMorning Joe today and admitted in response to a question aboutAleppo, Syria, that hehad no idea what “Aleppo” was. This was a pretty big mistake for someone who is likely to get millions of votes in the upcoming presidential election, sotheNew York Times wrote a story about it. Except that its story misidentified Aleppo.

The@nytimes, while chiding Gary Johnson for a "surprising lack of foreign policy knowledge," gets basic fact wrongpic.twitter.com/15OAr2IGc1

— Justin Green (@JGreenDC)September 8, 2016

ISIS’s de facto capital is Raqqa, not Aleppo. Whoops! But the paper realized its mistake pretty quickly and changed the story.From an archive site:

Here’s the problem: Aleppo is not an ISIS stronghold, either. It’s a divided city thatdoesn’t have much of an ISIS presence and is the site ofheavy ongoing fighting between the Syrian government and other rebels. So theTimes had to change its story again.

Ruling: Finally correct.

Meanwhile, a gentleman namedChristopher Hill who was the U.S.’s ambassador to Iraq under Obama also made the Raqqa/Aleppo mistake while ostensibly having a laugh at Johnson’s expense.

#ProTip: Dont use FP credentials to criticize politician for not knowing what Aleppo is & then say it's ISIS capitalpic.twitter.com/aYPTcCWQOq

— Jamie Weinstein (@Jamie_Weinstein)September 8, 2016

To be clear, I publish this post with full knowledge that, according to the Law of Cascading Condescension, I have made a ghastly factual error of my own somewhere within it.