A friend of mine asked me to put together an educational “seminar” for her about politics. She wanted a nonpartisan presentation of all the major issues and where the candidates stood on them so that she’d be ready to make an informed decision come time to cast her vote. I began preparing for this “seminar” tonight by going to each candidate’s website and reading what they had to say in the Issues sections. I began with Defense. And as I began to copy and paste key passages from barackobama.com to a Word document for later reference, I started to think that something was off.

Until tonight, I was under the impression that Obama wanted to cut defense spending. I got under this impression because that’s what he’s said. One video clip I saw on YouTube captured him saying “I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending. I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems.”

But then his website says things like, “we must build up our special operations forces, civil affairs, information operations, and other units and capabilities that remain in chronic short supply; invest in foreign language training, cultural awareness, and human intelligence and other needed counterinsurgency and stabilization skill sets.” He says he wants to increase the size of our military, taking the Army to 65,000 troops and the Marines to 27,000 troops. He even wants to further fund weapons research, making sure that we’re keeping up with the 21st Century in terms of naval ships, missile defense, and armor. His website would have me believe that he’s totally pro-military. And that’s a Barack Obama I could support.

So where did the other guy go? The guy that who wanted to save us tons of money by jeopardizing our safety? Because it looks to me like that guy done and turned into John McCain.

The Defense plans on both the Obama and McCain websites are almost identical now. While they still disagree on the Middle East exit strategy, their general military attitudes are the same: more troops, better weapons. So I guess Obama has changed his mind again.

Oh, is THAT what Obama’s always talking about when he says, “change, change, change”? Changing his MIND? I get it now!

But seriously. While I’m not angry that Obama realized he was wrong and switched his stance, I do wonder what effect, if any, this is going to have on his economic plan. As Obama has been criticized for his proposed increases in government spending, he has been able to justify them because of what cuts he also says he’ll make. Several billion dollars of these so-called cuts were supposed to come from the defense budget. Now they’re not. So it’s a whole lot of spending and not a whole lot of cuts. Sound wise to you?

It looks to me like Obama’s got to change something. Again. Whether he returns to his anti-military ways or revokes his proposals for more and more spending, his platform as it stands now is imbalanced. If a candidate keeps trying to switch things up to make people happy, he’s got to make sure none of those people are paying close attention when he starts to spout off non-sequiturs.

Sorry, Obama. I am.