A metaphor, you say? How could an aging, practically antique airplane possibly be a metaphor for our land? I’m glad you asked.
First, she’s big. According to www.stratofortress.org, the B-52HStratofortress is 159 feet 4 inches long, with a wingspan of 185 feet. If you use the end zones, you can park two of them on a high-school football field, but it won’t be easy. Watch out for the grass, though, because the maximum takeoff weight is officially 244 tons.

Secondly, she’s powerful. Depending on which weapons mounting pylons are used, the B-52H can carry a maximum of 51 or 45 munitions. At her most powerful, those munitions are nuclear in nature.

According to Fox News Channel, the payload of today’s mission was cluster-bombs. To the uninitiated, it’s the big version of a coffee can full of firecrackers. They’re not pretty. You don’t want to be around when one is dropped.

The most striking feature of the B-52H Stratofortress is her range. She’s the long arm of the law. Her eight Pratt & Whitney engines put out 17,000 lbs of thrust. 48,000 gallons of fuel take her 8,800 miles.

I know you have questions, so I’ll go ahead and answer them for you:

1. More than 5 gallons per mile
   
2. Anywhere
   

That’s right, anywhere. We can reach out with this great, powerful arm, and strike anywhere in the world that we want to, anytime we want to. 94 in inventory, multiplied by 51 nuclear weapons (or just a dozen, for that matter) can deal enough death to mollify any threat, annihilate any enemy and execute millions.

Osama bin Laden would LOVE to have access to this weapon. This weapon, even if only a single plane, could destroy Israel on the way Washington, DC. We just train with them. In Palestine, Arafat and his extremist followers plan bombing runs on the Jews. We could solve that problem quickly enough, but we don’t. This weapon is not for use, unless absolutely necessary. Like the pistol in the bedside drawer, the B-52 is only for defensive use. The message is clear. If you threaten harm to the United States or our interests, you can be destroyed.

But wait, you say, what about that metaphor? I’m glad you brought that up.

America is big. We joke about how big Texas is, but that’s just peanuts to the full 50 states. We are 285 million strong, and we have the best of everything. Our economy is enormous. Want to talk about power? All it really takes for us to turn a communist country into a freer place is to start dumping Levis and Big Macs into their black market, plus Rock and Roll into their airwaves. Want to talk about a long reach? We pulled that trick on the Soviet Union, and now we say “former.” We’re pulling it now on China, and it’s causing them some problems. It seems there are outbreaks of liberty that must be crushed.

America reaches out to the world every day, and is hated for it. We reach out and bring food to the hungry in Afghanistan, even as we bomb our targets within the same country. We reach out and there are jobs for the jobless on the other side of the world. We reach out with doctors to repair birth defects in children in what we used to call Third-World countries. When we fail, it tends to be because of enemies of freedom, home or abroad.

We’re the United States of America. We’re big. We’re powerful. We have a long reach. We’re not perfect, but we carry the greatest weapon of all. That weapon is freedom.