To be clear, I don't claim to have the high-brow intellect of Brian Williams of NBC News, Diane Sawyer of ABC News or Anderson Cooper of CNN, but I am bright enough to ask a few tough questions of our President. Brian, Diane and Anderson, if you have the opportunity to interview the President, please feel free to steal these questions, unless you feel that asking tough questions will somehow diminish your journalistic "integrity." You might want to take notes:
- Mr. President, your administration did not approve the upper part of the Keystone Pipeline despite years of review but are now supporting the lower half of the pipeline and pledging to speed the approval process for only this part of the pipeline. Without supporting the upper half, essentially aren't you essentially supporting a pipeline to nowhere?
- Mr. President, when you were elected, you said that you would have the most transparent administration in history. Since that time, Democratic leaders in Congress passed your health care legislation without even giving members of Congress or the public time to read it. You also have recently claimed Executive Privilege for documents that pertain to the Fast and Furious investigation. What do you say to the American citizens who remember what you said about transparency and now see what you have done and are doing?
- Mr. President, in your autobiography, you talked about listening to Marxist professors and attending socialist conferences, in addition to using drugs "enthusiastically" while you were in college and high school. How have these experiences shaped your views as President? What did you learn from these Marxist professors and socialist conferences?
- Mr. President, you have continued to blame your predecessor, George Bush, for the economy. At what point will you begin to accept blame for this economy?
- Mr. President, if you aren't reelected as President, how long should Americans blame you for the economy in the next Administration?
- Mr. President, you have provided a birth certificate indicating you were born in Hawaii, but why did your publisher tout the fact that you were "Kenyan born" for over 15 years? Did you provide this information to your publisher as is the case with almost all authors? If you didn't provide this bio, why wasn't this mistake corrected until the months before you ran for President?
- Mr. President, while running for President and when you were first elected, you were vehemently opposed to housing prisoners at Gitmo, using enhanced interrogation techniques to obtain information and other practices that you deemed to be inhumane and not in line with American values. As President, you now have a "kill list" of people who are suspected of being terrorists. How can killing suspected terrorists be more humane or more in line with American values than housing or interrogating a live known terrorist?
- Mr. President, on two different occasions in 2011, while talking with Unvision, you discussed how the separation of powers outlined by the Constitution would prevent you from ignoring laws passed by Congress in order to allow illegal immigrants stay in this country. Earlier this month, you announced that you were going to do just that -- allow certain illegal immigrants to stay in this country. What changed in the past year in the Constitution or in laws passed by Congress to make you change your mind?
- Mr. President, when you issued your Executive Order allowing certain immigrants to stay in this country, weren't you essentially creating new law? What part of the U.S. Constitution allows you to issue new laws through Executive Order superceding those laws already passed by Congress and signed by a previous President? Did you not take an oath to uphold the laws of the United States?
- Mr. President, now that through an Executive Order you have allowed an estimated one million illegal immigrants to stay in this country and work, what would you say to millions of Americans who are unemployed or underemployed and desperately need those jobs currently being taken by those who are in this country illegally? What would you say to the thousands of American students who have applied to colleges and universities, only to be turned down because of space limitations, while illegal immigrants have been accepted?
- Mr. President, you have attended more fundraisers than your past three predecessors combined at this same point in their administrations. What do you say to those out-of-work Americans who wonder if you are spending more time trying to be reelected than working to help them put food on their tables by improving this economy?
- Mr. President, ads produced by your campaign have attacked Mitt Romney for his work at Bain Capital, a venture capital firm. While Bain risked the dollars of private investors, did your administration essentially do the same thing -- except with taxpayer dollars -- in loans and investments to firms such as Solyndra? How many of these firms failed and how much in taxpayer dollars have been lost?
- Mr. President, since the Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the State of Arizona has the right to check immigration status during traffic stops, your Administration has ended programs of cooperation with this state in enforcing immigration laws. Isn't this vindictive, and don't these changes signal to those living illegally in Arizona that the federal government is not going to enforce immigration laws vigorously?
- Mr. President, what leading economic indicators have improved since you were inaugurated in January 2009?
Maybe I'm just a dreamer, but it seems to me that someone in the mainstream news media should be willing to ask tough questions. After all, these are the types of questions that millions of Americans, including this one, want answered.
No comments:
Post a Comment