J. D. Pendry

J. D. Pendry

“O beautiful for heroes proved,
in liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life…”
- O Beautiful for Spacious Skies, Katharine L Bates, 1904

I visited my Father this Memorial Day weekend. Along with siblings and wives, we cleaned the grass clippings from the headstone bearing his name and my Mother’s. We also cleaned the clippings from the Veteran’s plaque at the foot of the grave, added some fresh flower decorations and flags. Small American flags dotted the cemetery, each of them marking the resting place of a Veteran. The cemetery caretakers place them there. A small, solitary flag is all that marked some graves. Maybe their visitors would come later in the day.

Each time I take in that scene I cannot help but wonder, without Americans such as these “who more than self their country loved”, where might we be today? Or, what might we be? Their sacrifices throughout our history have allowed us to live free and prosper. They are winners, “heroes proved”, all of them. They were winners when winning mattered.

I have a challenge for you. Maybe you can offer it to your favorite politician as well. Name a war in which the winners decided that it was ended. Having trouble? The Revolutionary War, Civil War, World War I, or maybe World War II? In each of them, it was the loser’s surrender that ended it.

Losers have a potent voice in America these days, especially since losing Vietnam for us. They control much of the political debate and are bolstered by a like-minded media who happily propagandize for them. You knew these losers when they were kids. Every day at school, they’d get punched in the face, have their book bags tossed in the dumpster and lose their lunch money to some illiterate slug. They always believed that their superior intellect and understanding would extricate them from those situations. It never dawned on them that an ignorant hooligan wasn’t interested much in their tolerance or intellectual ability. The bully wanted to dominate them and take what they had and was willing to bloody their nose to achieve his aims. He usually wasn’t inclined toward reasonable dialogue.

It is quite easy to pick out our now adult losers. They begin every statement claiming to speak for most Americans, so convinced that most Americans must think as they do. “Most Americans want.” “Most Americans need.” “Most Americans think.” If this is what one hears each time the television news plays, which is where most of us have our thoughts programmed each day, some of us will start to believe that we’re not normal unless we want, need or think as the losers insist most of us do. To prove themselves superior they must define others as inferior. They’ve often referred to the men and women, many of whom rest beneath those flags, as murderers, Nazis, terrorists…you’ve heard it all so you don’t need the laundry list. A soon as they define themselves as superior, then they start insisting that it’s the moral high ground we must achieve - the same moral high ground that left them with bloodied noses and no lunch money.

Someday, and it’ll probably be after we’ve lost a city and a million citizens, they might come to realize that there is an entity out there that is only interested in our destruction. They don’t want what we have; they just want to remove it from the world so others can’t have it or know of it. By the time they’ve had their epiphany, however, it just might be too late.

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The Declaration of Independence

What we hold true, our enemy’s “Creator” does not. They cannot understand a God that gave men the free will to choose their paths. They cannot understand a nation that began its history with that concept. They want us and that idea gone more than they want themselves to live. They are not interested in our intellect and tolerance. They are dangerous and are committed to total war. We aren’t.

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.” – Ronald Reagan

The men and women who rest beneath those flags on this day had the strength and courage to face our enemies so that our cherished freedom could pass to us. If we follow the losers and surrender, we will have failed in preserving that gift and passing it to future generations of Americans.

Copyright © 2007 J. D. Pendry

We still call it Decoration Day here in Wild Wonderful. Many of us will visit a cemetery this weekend and pay our respects to those who have stood final muster and answered their last recall. I’ll visit my Father, WWII Navy Veteran Hudson Grey Pendry. Most of our youngsters don’t know about this special day and what it represents. Take the opportunity this weekend to forget politicians and their antics. Instead, take time to visit a cemetery and reserve some time in your mind and heart for people who truly deserve our thoughts. Take time to educate a youngster about Memorial Day. Tell them why we must remember the Men and Women who have sacrificed so that we can remain a free nation.

As you remember those who’ve served and sacrificed, take a moment and a knee and give thanks for those who are serving and sacrificing now.

Please have a safe Memorial Day Weekend.

Franklin Roosevelt’s D-Day Prayer

June 6, 1944

My fellow Americans: Last night, when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far.

And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:

Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith. They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong.

He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.

They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest-until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men’s souls will be shaken with the violences of war.

For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and good will among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.

Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.

And for us at home — fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas — whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them–help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.

Many people have urged that I call the Nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.

Give us strength, too — strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces. And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.

And, O Lord, give us Faith.

Give us Faith in Thee; Faith in our sons; Faith in each other; Faith in our united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.

With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister Nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men.

And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.

Thy will be done, Almighty God.

Amen.

J. D. Pendry

Political labels are meaningless. Republican, Democrat, Conservative, Liberal, Moderate. I don’t know what any of them mean or represent anymore, except that most of us fool ourselves into supporting the one who best plays the role of our choice. Personally, I think one collective name for the entire Washington establishment might work. Sick Bastards come to mind, but this is a family friendly letter so Dumb, Dumber and Dumbest seem more apropos… I keep getting an image of John McCain and Ted Kennedy butt slapping as if they just came out of a football huddle. They’re all politicians and their particular brand matters not.

Politician-Americans. A class of humankind living in their own unique eco, or better said egosystem. They wander around in there, much as they do in Hollywood, believing they’re perfectly normal and that the rest of America thinks acts and lives as they do. They are power sick and small minded people many of which have never held a job. They believe they’re better equipped to plan and manage my life and yours than we are. Instead of using vast amounts of information, and their atrophied brains to make smart decisions for our country, they rely on polls taken from a woefully uninformed constituency. A constituency with its information and thoughts provided by media that’s lost its way, if you’re gullible enough to believe it ever had a way. Media that long ago decided that taking one side or the other is better than providing truthful, factual information.

Politicians who live by polls are not leaders, they’re vote whores. I want to vote for leaders, don’t you? I want someone in Washington that will make smart, informed choices on my behalf. Can you imagine any corporation surviving if it was operated the way Congress seems to not function these days. If you were a corporate executive officer, would you want all of your high paid managers to poll the assembly line workers before making leadership decisions that will have broad and long term consequences for the corporation? Me neither. Those assembly line workers are important people, but probably lack the information needed to make corporate level decisions. That is what is happening in Washington. Every time a pin headed politician cites a poll, he or she is avoiding leadership and allowing the assembly line worker, whose corporate knowledge ends at put tab A into slot B, to make decisions that have long term implications for our country. Why? Simple. It’s not about what’s best for the country; it’s about what’s best to get votes. Our country is run in never ending election cycles. Our long term vision consists of empty poll based promises that recycle every two years for Congressional elections. If you observe closely, you can see America swirling much like what you see when you push the flusher on your toilet. Politicians are leading us down into their dysfunctional cesspool. I don’t think I want to go there with them. Do you?

We started losing America when we started hyphenating ourselves. We went much farther down the road to our demise when we decided that somehow we had the right to not be offended by what someone else says. For years, politicians have been so fearful of being Imused by Al Sharpton and the media that they communicate to us in platitudes. The ones having courage to speak plainly and from their hearts are immediately labeled as a phobic of some sort and marginalized by those “intellectuals” who comprise the scum on the surface of Media Pond.

I’m looking for leaders that will not have a problem calling BS on stupidity.

The leaders I’m willing to support will understand that security is our most important issue and that our country is not secure until our borders and ports of entry are totally controlled and we know who is here now. I love hard working people who come here looking to support their families, but the hard fact is that 50 percent of the New Jersey gang walked across the US southern border at Brownsville, Texas and entered the country illegally. Our solution to that problem, it appears, is to give them amnesty for doing it. How many more Islamo-Nazis have crossed our open borders and are there any leaders in Washington with the courage to publicly consider that or who even give a rat’s hind end? Leaders understand that there are dangerous people in the world who want nothing more than the destruction of our country and that you don’t negotiate with them, you do unto them as they would you, but you do it first. You also don’t leave the door open for them to come in and kill you. If Rosie and Paris were elected to Congress, America wouldn’t notice a difference.

I’m not a politician, so I can’t preface what I say by presuming to speak for most Americans, but I think it’s time for all of us who claim Americanship to send a loud and clear message to Washington. It’s time knock off the crap and secure our country while we still have one. It’s time for you to lead, follow or get the hell out of the way.

Copyright © 2007 J.D. Pendry

I’ve studied leaders most of my adult life. They were real life studies of the leaders closest to me, not book studies. Shameless plug here, but the product of those observations is The Three Meter Zone. It’s about the leadership that happens close to you and shapes your views on life and leading. All of the good leaders have something in common. They stay focused on the most pressing problem with which they’re faced until it is solved. Their concern for the people they lead is sincere and selfless. The bad ones all suffer from the same malady. Cranial Rectal Inversion Syndrome (CRIS). Their actions always reveal their true focus, which is rarely the most pressing problem or the people they lead.I never paid close attention to politicians until after 9/11. That was the point at which I realized that these are the men and women that will lead our country to victory against the collection of mass murderers who attacked us or they’ll lead us into defeat and submission. Since we are into never-ending political campaigns, I thought it would be a public service to share with you some examples of CRIS.

CRIS sufferers spend much of their time emphasizing that 90 percent of Islam is peaceful. As is typical, their focus is on something that is not the problem. They won’t reinforce to you that the questionable10 percent represents more than 100,000,000 people (equal to one-third the population of the United States) who want you dead. Not only do they want you dead, but they want to die trying to kill you so they can secure their places in paradise. Because that’s what they believe the instruction manual provided to them by their god through their profit tells them to do. The 90 percent is a problem too, but only to the extent that it allows the 10 percent to exist and commit mass murder in the name of their religion.

They will tell you that big oil is the problem and insist that greed is why you pay higher prices at the gas pump. Without greed, there would be no record profits and big oil CEOs wouldn’t get those huge bonuses. The solution to all of our energy problems is to Hugo Chavez the oil industry’s profits, build wind mills, grow more corn and to power our vehicles with French fry grease. Again, they fail to focus on the problem. The problem is that bought and paid for career politicians are the cause of high prices at the gas pump. It starts with our dependence on foreign sources for energy. A problem created primarily by many years of not developing our own resources. Politicians in the pockets of special interest groups have, for most of our lifetimes, prevented the development of our country’s available energy resources. It may shock you to know that we have more potential oil reserve than does the entire Middle East. Read this report, and this one, and this one. You’ll come away knowing that with more than 2.6 trillion barrels of potential oil there is no reason, other than political CRIS, that we should be propping up Middle East terrorist states with oil money. We should be competing with them. One of our strategic goals should be to put OPEC out of business. Politics will prevent that. Big oil is complicit too, make no mistake, but why should they want more oil on the market? Economics 101. Less supply equals high demand. High demand equals high prices. High prices equal large oil industry profits. Could be that’s why they make big contributions to all brands of politicians. Politicians put big oil in the cat bird’s seat it enjoys and they did it at the expense of our national security and your wallet.

When our country is attacked and many innocent people are murdered, they’ll vote to send men and women to war because it’s the popular thing to do. Then when it proves to be a tougher and dirtier task than the sterile bomb sight videos to which Americans became accustomed, and the popularity wanes, they’ll abandon Soldiers on the battlefield and do everything within their power to undermine the mission. It’s because they view the world through the fog of politics where Soldiers are simply a political tool to be sacrificed or abandoned depending on which direction the popular political winds blow.

They’ll tell you all is lost in Iraq and we should quit. What they refuse to see and tell you is that this war is indeed about al Qaeda and its offshoots. If we quit Iraq before al Qaeda is expelled from the country and Iraq is secure, it’ll be the greatest recruiting tool that the terrorists could ever hope for. But, that’s only the tip of it. All around the world and in the Middle East it’ll take little to convince the masses that the most powerful nation on earth is unable to stand up to a stateless collection of terrorists. That America is nothing to fear. That it’s exactly as bin Laden said, a paper tiger. Then, like the New Jersey Nuts, they’ll be here and thicker than flies on a cow pie.

Someday, throughout Washington, DC we need to hear a loud resounding pop. Hopefully, when we do, instead of a bomb it will be the sound of 500 plus heads being pulled from rectums.

Copyright © 2007 J. D. Pendry

The Army is full of convicted felons. If not felons, then poor people who enlisted as their only hope for an education. Unbelievably, that was not John Kerry or Charles Rangel. It was Round Rosie on ABCs’ The View. Mission accomplished Rosie, Barbara Walters, ABC management, sponsors of The View and even the section of cheering imbeciles in the audience. You did it. With Rosie’s mouth, and its defective operating system, you have accomplished what Rush Limbaugh and every other conservative pundit in the media business has been unable to. You have demonstrated to the world that there is not a dab of difference between the misfiring brain cells in the head of Rosie O’Donnell and those in the heads of many members of the United States Congress. But, be assured, they all support our ignorant, convicted felons who simply have no other choice in life.

How does what Round Rosie offer differ from what Congress offers us each day that United States Troops face an enemy determined to kill them and destroy us? It doesn’t. Is it honest to say you support the troops, but not the mission? No, it isn’t. An overwhelming majority of the United States Congress voted to commit American Military Men and Women to combat. When you commit the troops to combat with your vote, you are duty and honor bound to do everything within your power to ensure they are victorious. Anything less is desertion and dereliction.

Instead of supporting the troops toward victory, Dick Durbin called them Nazis. John Murtha called them cold-blooded murderers. Ted Kennedy announced to the Arab world that Iraq’s torture chambers have reopened under new management. John Kerry said that they are terrorizing Iraqi women and children in their homes. Barrack Obama tells us that lives lost in Iraq were wasted. I only wanted to rehash that to point out that Rosie could easily be mistaken for a member of Congress or vice versa. I often wonder if the applause she gets isn’t coming from some of them.

I haven’t followed the presidential candidate debates, it’s a little too early for me, but I have read some of the transcripts and heard a few snippets. John Edwards is quite apologetic about the mistake he claims to have made voting to send Soldiers to war. He’s a top Democrat contender and a little self-absorbed. If he is elected president, what will his next big mistake be? Will it be not committing Soldiers to our defense when needed because he fears making another mistake? If I cannot trust a man to be well enough informed to make difficult decisions and stand by them, I certainly cannot trust him with the security of my country. I couldn’t trust this one with the security of my tool shed.

Barrack Obama, when answering a question about what we should do if there is a nuclear attack on our cities said we should prepare our first responders. Our first responders? Doesn’t that concede the inevitability of another devastating attack? I suppose putting out the fires and picking up body parts is important. Does this mean that the State Senator from Illinois, if elected President will wait for another attack? A true 9/10 view.

Hillary Clinton said she would retaliate if we were nuked – as soon as she was certain about to whom we should retaliate. This just shows another level of naiveté. Mr. Clinton flung missiles in the general direction of trouble. Do you reckon this is what Mrs. Clinton intends? I am all for retaliation. The problem is this. The United States is not going to get nuked first by a nation state. It will be anywhere from a .5 to a 1.5 Kiloton suitcase sized weapon that may have already crossed one of our unprotected borders. When it happens, it will come at the hands of terrorists. Maybe with state sponsors, but do you think the liberal Democrats and Mrs. Clinton will retaliate with a nuclear weapon when we link Iran to the terrorists? Nor do I. When they hit, and we are on our knees the Chinese and Russians will be happy to launch a couple to finish the job. So, Mrs. Clinton toward whom and how?

I’m not ready to sign up for any Presidential candidate at this point. All of the Democrats want to leave Iraq post haste and go on the defensive or “dialogue.” Some Republicans seem content to bash the President while vowing to get the job done - better. Most of that is poll directed political speak. The only one that appears to have broken the code is the man that endured 9/11 as the Mayor of New York. He saw first hand what waiting for an attack brings. Giuliani believes we need to stay on the offensive. Me too. Whether you like the stated reasons for our being there or not, as General Petraeus reminded us, Iraq is “the central front of al Qaeda’s global campaign.” Isn’t it better to keep them bottled up there than it is to confront them here? This enemy will never break contact. Either we take it to them or they will bring it to us. Please write that one down where you can see it everyday.

Oh well, what’s the point anyway. Harry said it’s lost. Besides, who can fight a sophisticated war when uneducated felons, Nazis, cold-blooded murderers, torturers… man the military?

I’ll be in the back yard working on the bunker.

Copyright © J. D. Pendry 2007