Questions For Democrats

George Will posts a series of questions for Hillary Clinton, questions which all Democrats should be obligated to answer.

In March 2003, Bush launched a war of choice to accomplish regime change in Iraq, mistakenly believing it was developing weapons of mass destruction. In March 2011, Barack Obama and you launched a war of choice against Libya for the humanitarian purposes of preventing, it was said, as many as 10,000 deaths at the hands of Moammar Gaddafi. Since March 2011, in Syria, where the regime continues to use chemical weapons that it supposedly agreed to surrender, the civil war has killed more than 320,000. Why humanitarian intervention in Libya instead of Syria? Bush sought, and you as a senator gave, approval for his war of choice. Obama and you, arguing that the thousands of airstrikes that killed thousands of Libyans did not constitute “hostilities,” never sought approval for the Libyan war. Who was more lawful, Bush or Obama and you? What criteria suggest that the world is safer than before you became secretary?
 

In this month’s Wisconsin Democratic convention straw poll, you defeated Bernie Sanders 49 percent to 41 percent. Sanders says he is a “socialist.” Do you have fundamental differences with him? If not, are you a socialist? He does not think a 90 percent top income-tax rate is too high. Do you? He says “almost all of” America’s wealth “rests in the hands of a handful of billionaires.” Forbes magazine says the combined net worth of America’s 536 billionaires is $2.566 trillion. Is it a grave problem that the 536 have 3 percent of America’s $84.9 trillion wealth? Is it deplorable that the Waltons became a family of billionaires by creating Wal-Mart, America’s largest private-sector employer? Do you regret that Apple products made Steve Jobs a billionaire? Are any of your however many phones iPhones?
 

Sanders vows “to make tuition in public colleges and universities free.” Do you agree that the 68 percent of Americans without college degrees should pay the tuition for those whose degrees will bring them lifetime earnings significantly higher than the earnings of the non–college graduates who will have paid much of the cost of the “free” tuition?

 

...And so on.

In a better world James Lilecks would have a show on Comedy Central. Here's his take on the Confederate flag kerfluffle.

 

And Kevin Williamson examines the insane left.

 

For the Left, it feels like time is running out. So it isn’t sufficient that same-sex marriages be legalized; bakers and florists must be locked in prison if they decline to participate in a gay couple’s ceremony. It isn’t sufficient that those wishing to undergo sex-change surgery be permitted to go their own way; the public must pay for it, and if Bruce Jenner is still “Bruce” to you, you must be driven from polite society.

 

...You have to credit the Left: Its strategy is deft. If you can make enough noise that sounds approximately like a moral crisis, then you can in effect create a moral crisis. Never mind that the underlying argument — “Something bad has happened to somebody else, and so you must give us something we want!” — is entirely specious; it is effective. In the wake of the financial crisis, we got all manner of “reform,” from student-lending practices to the mandates of Elizabeth Warren’s new pet bureaucracy, involving things that had nothing at all to do with the financial crisis. Democrats argued that decency compelled us to pass a tax increase in the wake of the crisis, though tax rates had nothing to do with it. A crisis is a crisis is a crisis, and if a meteor hits Ypsilanti tomorrow you can be sure that Debbie Stabenow will be calling for a $15 national minimum wage because of the plight of meteor victims.

...When the South actually was a segregationist backwater that African-Americans were fleeing by the million — when Democrats were running the show — they were ho-hum. Today the South is an economic powerhouse, dominated by Republicans, and attracting new African-American residents by the thousands. And so the Left and its creature, the Democratic party, insist that Southern identity as such must be anathematized. The horrific crime that shocked the nation notwithstanding, black life in Charleston remains very different, in attractive ways, from black life in such Left-dominated horror shows as Cleveland and Detroit, and the state’s governor is, in the parlance of identity politics, a woman of color — but she is a Republican, too, and therefore there must be shrieking, rending of garments, and gnashing of teeth.