1301 Soft Targets
1301 Soft Targets
Soft target: Something or someone vulnerable, easily attacked or taken advantage of.
As a military concept, soft targets are easy to understand. Terrorism is a soft target enterprise. Victims are mostly unaware and defenseless – generally a population of women, children and non-combatants.
The idea of soft targets is not just a military one. In America, places of business, schools, a theatre and a temple have fallen victim. The common denominator through every one of the situations was vulnerability. John Lot, author with William Landes of a groundbreaking 1999 study, has observed that “every public shooting since 1950 in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed [with the one exception of the Gabrielle Gifford attack] has taken place where citizens were not allowed to carry guns.”
But there are other more insidious attacks occurring on other equally soft targets. The Republican Party’s establishment version of conservatism is one good example. At a Cobb County (GA) Chamber of Commerce panel discussion, pollster Matt Towery offered the white flag. “The ghost of Ronald Reagan is finally going to have to leave the Republican Party,” he said.
Towery offers capitulation as a solution. This brand of conservatism is perfect for liberal sniping. It doesn’t know how to fight, it doesn’t know how to make the fundamentals attractive and its devotion to its core principles is anemic. Its only solution is to become more like the opposition.
The problem is that no one respects or trusts groveling losers. Conservatives like Towery want Reagan, who won both elections with historic margins, to be a ghost when they should be listening to him as a mentor and teacher. Such conservatism can’t shoulder steeled principles and doesn’t have the skill to be attractive so it becomes a soft target.
Your paycheck has now become one of the most lucrative objects of advantage-taking. In their quest to be all things to all creatures great and small, politicians great and small continue to raid other citizens’ piggy banks in order to feed pork, guard privilege or finance campaigns which batter the walls of limited government, individual liberty, and fiscal restraint. In the end, we will read by government light bulbs, stay warm in government retro-fitted homes powered by government-controlled energy. We will bicycle to work in government-planned neighborhoods while being cared for by a government medical system. Big Daddy will secure us; all we have to do is surrender.
But the most deadly soft target to lose is truth- both truth and The Truth. A famous person has written: “Implicit … in the very idea of ordered liberty is the rejection (emphasis added) of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or ‘ism’, any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single unalterable course …” (Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope).
There it is; the utopian socialist view of truth and liberty. If truth can be muddled and manipulated, the state will order your liberty. During President Obama’s Newtown speech he did it best himself. After abusing The Truth, Scripture, several times, he asked this telling and leading question, “Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children … is somehow the price of our freedom?”
The implicit principle is simple, “Give me your freedom, sacrifice truth, and Big Daddy will take care of you”.