subject: The Best Defense Is To Be Offensive? [print this page] Trying To Keep Us Safe With Nothing But Hope And Change
by Michael D. Hume, M.S.
Know what my favorite workout is these days? Okay, you're gonna laugh it me... I like to go out in the sunshine here at our Colorado summer home and play basketball - with myself.
In order to make it a true cardio-interval, sweat-producing, beneficial workout, I can't just hang out on the court and make shots at the basket. No, I have to play a full-out pretend game against my invisible opponent. I'm sure it looks goofy as all get-out, neighbors walking or jogging or driving by and seeing me out there workin' it, bustin' my moves, takin' it hard to the hole with no one actually trying to defend against me.
My wife calls from her office, and I'm in the middle of a hot hoops match. "How's it going?" she asks. "Good," I say, panting, gulping a little water. "Michael is locked in an epic struggle against Michael. It's gonna be close." "It always is," she says, patiently, understandingly, not laughing at me a bit, as far as I know. My wife is a saint.
Yesterday, it occurred to me that as Michael, my only defense against Michael is to hope that he misses. I literally have no other defense. No crafty defense strategy, not even any physical defenders - no actual body to put on a body, as they say. No, my only hope is that my opponent (myself, in this case) misses his mark.
As I mused on this, it occurred to me that I know about someone else who likes to shoot hoops: President Obama! Of course, he probably doesn't play goofy one-on-none games for exercise. Not that he couldn't. I can see the Secret Service out there, ringing the court, their backs discreetly turned away from the president's "game," making sure no one else can see him and point and giggle. My neighbors wouldn't stand a chance against those guys. I can see one Secret Service guy blushing when his wife asks him later where he got those stains on his trousers. "I can't tell you," he says, thinking to himself "because I got them by standing around getting hit in the butt by an errant basketball every four minutes." Then again, the prez probably doesn't make any errant shots.
So maybe Obama does the same kind of workout I do... and maybe THAT'S where he got his brilliant ideas for defense and national security!
It sure seems as though we're letting all sorts of bad guys play one-on-none against us, with a Hope and Change security/defense policy: Hope the perpetrators always screw up their attack, and fight back with a defense budget that amounts to pocket Change compared to the other items (mostly graft and entitlements) on the massive federal shopping list.
Well, and you could argue it's working. Guy tries to blow up an airplane on Christmas and elects to do it by trying to light his undies next to a passenger who doesn't want to get blown up and won't let him finish the deed. Whew! Good thing that other passenger was there... we were HOPING he'd be smart enough to stop that guy! Another jerk tries to blow up Times Square with a car bomb, but screws up the detonation. Yay! Just as we'd HOPED. Thousands of bad guys come streaming over our southern border, disguised as good guys who just want farm jobs, and we simply HOPE they're too distracted by killing each other for a chance to sell us drugs to actually take over the whole country... but if they decide to take over the country, we're not going to stop them. We're just gonna rest on Hope. We're not gonna Change.
We ARE going to let one group of bad guys, the radical Islamic group, build a victory shrine at the spot where they had one good day and did NOT miss. Hmm. The argument seems to go that we Hope letting them build the Ground Zero Mosque will get them to Change their views toward us, and start liking us enough to put a hold on further efforts to blow us all up.
What, you're offended by that? Well, you better just Hope you can Change your attitude, Mister Man!
Call me a wuss (in addition to being a goofy hoops-shooter), but I'm a little spooked by all the near misses the bad guys have had lately. I'm afraid all the practice they're getting will improve their game, and it only takes one ball in the basket to make a big mess in our world. Meanwhile, since our government doesn't have to worry about putting energy and resources into the folly of national security that has distracted so many previous administrations, they're free to focus all their efforts on printing money and "fundamentally transforming" our economy with a storm of socialism.
Scary!
So I'm trying to beef up my own personal defense. I'm working hard every day to stay in shape, I'm taking my vitamins, I'm working hard on my own business, and I'm saying a prayer of thanksgiving at sunset every day. Because when the bad guys have their next good day, I want to be as strong and ready as I can be.
That's the type of personal Change that is the foundation of real Hope... and our best defense against the coming storm.
