Ten Questions for the 2011 Republican Presidential Candidates
1. If you claim to be in favour of cutting spending for government programmes, please explain how you would implement this claim in the matter of the three billion dollars we send to Israel every year, and also the one trillion dollars which has so far been spending on the illegal and counter-productive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
2. If you claim that religion has a place in public life, please explain how you intend to acknowledge Islam in this manner.
3. If you claim that Christianity has a sole claim as the religion you want in public life, please explain how you intend to incorporate "love your enemies; do good to those who hate you" into your foreign policy and "let him who is without sin cast the first stone" into your policy regarding the death penalty, and "what god has joined let no man tear asunder" into your position on divorce.
4. If you claim that the government has no business interfering in the personal lives of its citizens, please explain how you would implement this claim in matters of abortion and gay marriage.
5. If you claim that corporations should have no impediments to creating wealth, please explain what objections you would have, in theory, to slavery (apart from the fact that it's illegal).
6. If you claim to oppose foreigners taking American jobs, please explain how you would implement this claim in the matter of US corporations effectively exporting entire tranches of the American workforce to India and China.
7. If you claim that you favour state rights over federal rights, and wish to see federal government reduced to almost nothing, can you explain how all the problems you see with federal government would not be reproduced at the state level once responsibility for those areas was transferred.
8. Additionally, if you favour a massive reduction in the role and size of government, please explain why you would not favour secession.
9. As a matter of policy, if you had, say 500 billion dollars to spend on a war thousands of miles away or on a program to cure sick Americans, which would you prefer (keeping in mind that we are aware of your voting record)?
10. Do you know the difference between a fact and an opinion? Please explain what you understand the difference to be.
Related: Some questions for conservative Christians, Why conservative Christians are functionally pro-choice, Science vs. religion and Fact vs. opinion.