Wolves in Sheep's clothing

After reading a number of my posts, a friend suggested I was prone to hyperbole. She said that I spent too much time focusing on what was wrong with the government and not enough time inspiring people. While I understand the power of inspiration, I couldn't have disagreed with her more. Inspiring is what someone wants to be on Sunday in the locker room before the big game. The goal is to energize the team to hit the field and play the best damn game they can so they can walk home with the trophy and feel like champions.

In politics, as in sports and life, inspiration is necessary, but not sufficient. Sun Tzu said “Every battle is won before it is ever fought.” He was right. The game is not won on Sunday, it’s won in the months and weeks and days leading up to the game. It’s won in the long arduous hours of practice in the sweltering heat of summer, it’s won by lifting weights until exhaustion sets in, it’s won by studying every game tape of your opponent you can get of your hands on so you can develop a strategy for success.

Inspiration is like adrenaline during a marathon; it gives you a burst when the gun goes off and it gives you the energy to surge at the end, but it’s not the fuel that powers you through the majority of the race. Many runners will tell you that the most difficult part of a race is not the end when you have a couple of miles to go and the finish line is just up ahead, rather it is the middle miles where the start is far behind and the finish line is too far off to be a reality. It is during those middle miles, when there’s no finish line to lunge for, that the focus can be lost, when the distractions creep in when some lose sight of why they are running in the first place. During those miles it is not adrenaline that carries one through, but rather it is the discipline forged by the days and weeks and months of hard work and preparation.

So too with politics. It is easy to generate enthusiasm in September and October as the ads start running, lawn signs become ubiquitous and candidates are out on the stump talking about what they want to achieve. The problem, however, is that by the time September and October roll around, many of the battles have already been won or lost. Parties have selected their nominees, candidates have crafted their positions and those less engaged by politics have figured out how to adapt to the latest problems Washington has foisted upon them, and are returning back to life as normal. The challenge is to keep the attention of the citizenry on the fact that the most dangerous threat to their liberty is not going to come in the form of a Pearl Harbor or 9-11 attack, but rather it is going to be the slow creep of just one more fee levied on those who have more than their share, or an innocuous new tax increase to support “the children,” or another ostensibly reasonable regulation meant to protect those lost souls not capable of deciding what they should eat in a restaurant to avoid a heart attack.

The problem with inspiration is that it’s a call to arms, not a plan of action. As such, the question becomes how does one keep people motivated through the April showers, May flowers and dog days of summer? The answer: By highlighting the reasons they should be engaged in the first place. Remind them that Barack Obama and the Democrats are wolves in sheep’s clothing. They hunt by stealth amongst the American polity. They rarely speak of their socialist Utopian dreams – although every now and then one of them will let the truth slip like Barack Obama with Joe the Plumber or Maxine Waters threatening to “socialize” big oil – but those are the nightmares they are saddling the country with.

To add probably one too many metaphors, the boy who cried wolf was not guilty of hyperbole, he was guilty of lying, so when the real wolf came, no one bothered to listen. Had he instead warned that the wolf was lurking it would have been possible to prepare a defense strategy so that when Mr. Wolf did indeed arrive, he could have been vanquished. The Democrat socialist agenda is once again a wolf in sheep’s clothing and the free thinking American sheep are on the menu. We, whose liberty, legacy, freedom and treasure are the main course for their carnivore’s ball, are obliged to point out how Barack Obama and his minions are destroying the things that made America great in the first place. If not us, who? If not now, when? Call it hyperbole if you must, but we call it trying to save our collective hides – no pun intended…