Green Offers Questions to the Candidates

David Michael Green, writing at The Regressive Antidote, has a series of excellent questions for all presidential candidates. These are questions that the media should be asking, but, hey, they don't want to get on the wrong site of their corporate masters now, do they? Why, if they started asking the hard questions the American people just might have the right kind of information to elect the best candidate. We can't have that now, can we?

HILLARY CLINTON: Your vote on both the Iraq and Iran resolutions are inexcusable. You claim to be tested, experienced and ready to go, but your rationalization for the Iraq vote is that you were essentially duped by the president, and that you were not voting to authorize war, just the threat of war. If you have such wisdom and experience, why were you fooled when so many other people throughout the world – including half the Democrats in Congress – were not? Why were you voting to give license to attack a country which had neither threatened nor attacked the United States? Why was Iraq an urgent threat that required military action when the Soviet Union was not throughout the entire Cold War?

JOHN McCAIN: Of all the candidates running, you are the greatest enthusiast for the Iraq war. You also claim to be riding the Straight-Talk Express. So, how about a little straight talk on Iraq? If Saddam Hussein was such a menace to his neighborhood, why did the United States, under Ronald Reagan, encourage him to attack Iran, and supply him with weapons and intelligence and satellite reconnaissance when he was doing so? If he was such a monster when he was using chemical weapons against both Iranians and Iraqis, why did Republican administrations in the US turn a blind eye to that and even protect the Iraqis from condemnation at the UN?

BARACK OBAMA: If you become the Democratic nominee, the GOP smear machine is going to attack you mercilessly. If you win the presidency, they are going to do everything imaginable to cripple your presidency, from the use of bogus allegations and investigations to relentless filibustering. How are you going to avoid being John Kerry? And if you manage that trick, how are you going to avoid being Bill Clinton or Harry Reid? (Hint: Saying nice things about ‘hope’ will be, ahem, somewhat less than sufficient to achieve that goal.)

MITT ROMNEY: Is it possible you could be any more oleaginous than you are? Oops, er, how’d that get in there? Never mind. Here’s the real question: Like every other Republican running for president, you bow to the true god of your party, and the true reason for its existence: tax cuts for the wealthy. All of these cuts, going back to Reagan, have been financed by borrowing, meaning that we are flat-out simply stealing from our children. Will you apologize for sticking them with the bill for the Republican Party’s party? For your reckless fiscal irresponsibility, your bacchanalia of greed and selfishness? And if you refuse to do that (and – call me a wild man out on a limb if you must – but something tells me you won’t be making this apology), will you at least tell us exactly which federal government programs you will cut in order to balance the budget against your tax cuts, so that we don’t increase the already monstrous $9 trillion that we now owe, the current (and rising) equivalent of $60,000 for every taxpayer in America?