In the bottom of the ninth, despite home field advantage, the home team finds itself down by one run and a man on first when the team’s weakest batter, with a two and two count, manages to put the ball through a hole and into short center field. The crowd is on its feet as the man on first heads for second base and the batter beats the throw to first. The play by play announcer is nearly screaming, “the runner is rounding third and headed for home.”

One thought is shared by the thousands in the stands, “we’re going to pull this thing out, the tying run is about to score and we have a runner on first with our power hitter on deck. We are going to win this thing.”

Then the inexplicable. Let’s listen to the announcer describe the action. “The runner has rounded third and is headed to home plate. The first baseman rifles the ball towards home. The runner stops, reverses course and heads back to third. The catcher throws to third but the runner beats the throw and tags the bag. OMG, he didn’t stop, he’s headed to second. Third baseman shoots the ball to second. The runner attempts to slide in. He’s a foot short of the bag when the second baseman tags him out. (sigh) It’s over folks. What just happened is beyond crazy. I don’t know how Monday morning quarterbacks will describe it but I do know we won’t be going to the Series this year.”

It’s been said that politics is just a game, a game played with our money, our emotions and sometimes our blood. And as in the baseball bit above, it can be just as illogical, inexplicable and boneheaded. Regardless of how you score the political events of November, 2020, the only thing that matters is that when the dust settled Joe Biden was the for real, one and only President of these United States. To borrow from the Persian poet Omar Khayyam, “The moving finger writes and having writ moves on. Nor all your piety and wit can lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it.”

There were a lot of tears when the fickle finger of fate finished recording the election of 2020 but those tears served only to dampen the cheeks of the weepers and the sounds of their sobbing was drowned out by the cheering from the other side.

We are only a quarter of the way into reaping the fruit of their victory but that short span of history has already proven that, whether fair or foul, they might know how to chalk up an election win in their column but they have not a clue as to how to govern. The question we must ask is what can we learn from the experience and (sounds silly, but…) is knowing how to run a country really important or is the whole thing truly about wielding power and amassing personal fortunes? To be perfectly candid, abandoning the rules for the sake of expedience seems to be a winning strategy although I sincerely hope we don’t have to stoop to that level, even for the good of the nation. We’ve never been ‘that guy’.

The US of A is barreling toward a cliff. Do we stand up and fight for the right to stop the runaway wagon or do we succumb to the easy path, grab what we can for ourselves and hope to jump out of the wagon before it goes crashing onto the ash heap of history?

For the past year our conversation has revolved around 2022. Okay, it’s here. If we want to win we had better get serious about the game. Take to heart the words of Tom Hanks in ‘A League of Their Own,’ when he said, “there’s no crying in baseball.” The same should be true in politics. Since 2020 we have wept, moaned, pointed fingers, moralized, pontificated, even wrote books to explain why we own the moral high ground, and through it all we are still the minority party.

We have just a few short months to either convert or neutralize the RINOs and to put together a platform that will benefit and thereby attract the independent voter and the suburban housewives. Platitudes, propaganda, class warfare and ballot manipulation techniques will not win elections for conservatives, those are in the opposition’s wheelhouse. We can never count on the dead voter bloc to bolster our numbers. We have to rely on telling the truth, keeping our promises, solid planning, fact based campaigns, proven results, and perhaps a tad more backbone.

Okay, batter up, and this time let’s swing for the fences.