Good Debate Questions to Ask Hillary Clinton

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— by Achilles

The vulture mainstream media does not even pretend to apply the same standards to Democrats and Republicans. The current President Barack Obama remains a genius to the media despite making many gaffes of his own that the media would have used as proof of idiocy if they were made by former President George W. Bush. President Obama claimed in one of his speeches that the people in Austria speak “Austrian” and not German. President Obama claimed to have been to America’s “57 states” and had “one left to go”. Like the boy in the movie “The Sixth Sense”, President Obama apparently can also see dead people, giving a Memorial Day speech and saying “On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience here today — our sense of patriotism is particularly strong”.

The same double standard is true for Democrat and Republican presidential debates. A few weeks ago, on October 28, 2015, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz was 100 percent right when he lashed out at the CNBC debate: “Let me say something at the outset. The questions asked in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media. This is not a cage match. And you look at the questions — Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain? Ben Carson, can you do math? John Kasich, will you insult two people over here? Marco Rubio, why don’t you resign? Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen? How about talking about the substantive issues?” Cruz hilariously compared the questions asked at the Republican debate with the debate questions asked of Democratic candidates “The contrast with the Democratic debate, where every thought and question from the media was, which of you is more handsome and why?”

Democratic audiences would probably consider me a heel for suggesting so, but I would love to see Ted Cruz serve as the debate moderator of the Democratic debates. I would love to see him ask Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton the same kinds of questions that Fox News moderator Megyn Kelly and CNBC’s moderators asked Republican candidates. Ted Cruz would consider questions about her Wellesley college thesis paper * about radical Chicago South Side activist Saul Alinsky and her ties to him to be fair game. Here are some of the questions that Cruz could ask her:

1) Secretary Clinton, in your college thesis paper titled “There is Only the Fight: An Analysis of the Alinsky Method”, you wrote in your acknowledgment “Although I have no ‘loving wife’ for keeping the children away while I wrote, I do have many friends and teachers who contributed to the process of thesis-writing”. Is it still your opinion that loving wives who tend to children are not as important to society as career women such as yourself?

2) Secretary Clinton, your acknowledgement thanked “Mr. Alinsky for providing a topic, sharing his time and offering me a job”. Did you know that Saul Alinsky’s own book “Rules For Radicals” contained a dedication to Lucifer for being “from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which),the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom”? Do you share Saul Alinsky’s appreciation for Lucifer and how do you reconcile this view of Lucifer with your professed Christian faith?

3)  Secretary Clinton, in page 2 of your thesis paper, you stated that, after he graduated from the University of Chicago and received a fellowship in criminology, Alinsky’s “first assignment [was] to get a look at crime from the inside of gangs. He attached himself to the [Al] Capone gang, attaining a perspective from which he viewed the gang as a huge quasi-public utility serving the people of Chicago.” Do you share Alinsky’s view that organized crime and gangs are a quasi-public utility that serves the people? Do you believe that a person can learn organizational skills and techniques from gangsters and successfully implement them in middle-class society and what specific skills or techniques would they be?

4)  Secretary Clinton, in page 6 of your thesis paper, you stated that “A radical is one who advocates sweeping changes in the existing laws and methods of government. These proposed changes are aimed at the roots of political problems which in Marxian terms are the attitudes and behaviors of men. Radicals are not interested in ameliorating the symptoms of decay but in drastically altering the causes of societal conditions.” Are you currently or have you ever been such a radical? If not, how does your political philosophy differ from that of a radical?

5)  Secretary Clinton, in page 8 of your thesis paper, you wrote “Alinsky argues that those who wish to change circumstances must develop mass-based organization and be prepared for conflict. He is a neo-Hobbesian who objects to consensual mystique surrounding political processes; for him, conflict is the route to power. Those possessing power want to retain it and often to extend the bounds of it. Those desiring a change in the power balance generally lack the established criteria of money or status and so must mobilize numbers. Mobilized groups representing opposed interests will naturally be in conflict which Alinsky considers a healthful and necessary aspect of a community organizing activity.” Do you share Alinsky’s philosophy and, if not, how does you philosophy differ from his?

6)  Secretary Clinton, in pages 9-10 of your thesis paper, you quote Alinsky that an organizer is “dedicated to changing the character of life of a particular community [and] has an initial function of serving as an abrasive agent to rub raw the resentments of the people in the community; to fan latest hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expressions . . . to provide a channel into which they can pour their frustrations of the past; to create a mechanism which can drain off guilt for having accepted the previous situation for so long a time. When those who represent the status quo label you [i.e. the community organizer] as an agitator they are completely correct, for that is, in one word, your function — to agitate to the point of conflict.” Are you a community organizer or an agitator? Do you believe that a community organizer is an admirable person? Would you agree that Alinsky’s definition of an agitator more accurately fits a demagogue who leads a lynch mob?

7)  Secretary Clinton, on page 43 of your thesis paper, you mention Professor Richard A. Cloward of the Columbia School of Social Work. Did you know that, on May 2, 1966, Professor Cloward and Frances Fox Piven wrote an article in The Nation titled “A Strategy to End Poverty” which David Horowitz described this Cloward-Piven Strategy as seeking “to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse”? Do you agree with, advocate or have worked to further the Cloward-Piven Strategy in the 45 years following your thesis paper?

8) Secretary Clinton, in the Appendices to your college thesis, you included a copy of an October 25, 1968 letter to you from Mr. Alinsky where he stated that his organization, The Industrial Areas Foundation, established a training institute in Chicago and was apparently seeking “trained sophisticated personnel who have highly developed organizational skills and talents for the purpose of building mass-based organizations”. Mr. Alinsky continued that “Keeping in mind that three-fourths of America is middle-class, a new and long overdue emphasis of the Institute will be placed upon the development of organizers for middle class society”. Are you now such an Alinsky-directed or inspired organizer with highly developed organizational skills and talents for America’s middle class society?

9) Secretary Clinton, in the Appendices to your college thesis, you included a copy of the Preliminary Application for the Industrial Areas Foundation Training Institute. Did you fill out the Preliminary Application and, if so, will you make a copy available to the press and to the American people?

10) Secretary Clinton, the Preliminary Application for the Industrial Areas Foundation Training Institute contained a number of very good questions. Please answer these questions as you would have answered them back in 1969, when you were 22 years of age, and as you would answer them now.

a) What have you attempted to organize? Where? When? With what success?

b) What kind of people are you interested in organizing? Why?

c) Exactly what do you do now? For whom? How long? Why?

d) What do you think are your greatest weaknesses? Your greatest strengths?

e) Why do you desire to become a professional organizer?

f) Assuming you are accepted and trained, what do you plan to do immediately upon completion of training?

g) What do you want out of life?

 11)  Secretary Clinton, in the Appendices of your college thesis, you wrote that “Mr. Alinsky and I met twice during October in Boston and during January at Wellesley. Both times he was generous with ideas and interest. His offer of a place in the new Institute was tempting but after spending a year trying to make sense out of his inconsistency, I need three years of legal rigor.” You then attended Yale Law School and graduated from law school in 1973. How have you used the legal rigor of your law school education and your experience as an attorney to further Alinsky’s philosophy and methods of the community organizer/agitator?

12)  Secretary Clinton, according to a March 18, 2007 article by Ryan Lizza in the New Republic, titled “The Agitator”, President Barack Obama was hired in 1985 right after college as a community organizer for the Chicago South Side’s Developing Communities Project. Obama was trained in the philosophy and methods of Saul Alinsky community organizer/agitator. One of Obama’s teachers said about him that “in ten years of training organizers, Obama was the best student he ever had. He was a natural, the undisputed master of agitation, who could engage a room full of recruiting targets in a rapid-fire Socratic dialogue, nudging them to admit that they were not living up to their own standards. With probing, sometimes personal questions, he would pinpoint the source of pain in their lives, tearing down their egos just enough before dangling a carrot of hope that they could make things better.” With both you and President Barack Obama being disciples of Saul Alinsky and heirs to his political philosophy and techniques, is there a fundamental difference between your and the President’s political philosophy, strategies, and tactics, other than the flavors of your different genders, races, and ages? Would a Hillary Clinton presidency simply be a continuation of Barack Obama’s presidency?

At the October 28, 2015 Republican presidential debate, Ted Cruz stated “The men and women on this stage have more ideas, more experience, more common sense, than every participant in the Democratic debate. That debate reflected a debate between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.” If Cruz had the opportunity to question Hillary Clinton about her philosophical allegiance to Saul Alinsky, both he and the American people would quickly find out Hillary Clinton’s brand of community activism and whether she is a Bolshevik or a Menshevik.

* Here is a link to Hillary Clinton’s college thesis paper: x