Category: Politics

Recently the Obama administration was crowing loudly about its success in vaporizing a single, notoriously vicious jihadist with a well-placed Hellfire missile. Mohammed Emwazi was a British citizen who not only joined the jihadist movement, but became one of its leading public executioners, quickly dubbed by the media Jihadi John. John had no qualms about publicly incriminating himself in widely distributed videos showing him sawing off the heads of helpless kneeling victims. His flair for such bloody publicity placed him at the very top of the high-value targets list and resulted in his mission as a fervent executioner for ISIS being abruptly truncated last week, according to U.S. authorities. Since John earned his own execution by drone missile last week, the Obama administration has been basking in the warm glow of his fiery demise, citing the event as evidence that its strategy for combatting ISIS is effective.

And therein lies the problem. In its article relating John’s demise, the U.K.’s Daily Mail includes a photograph that pretty much sums up the slapdash aspects of Obama’s strategy of going after newsworthy targets rather than those that are truly significant in terms of reducing the jihadis’ ability to wage war. View for a moment this aerial photo from the Mail’s article.

Note that the location of the drone strike on Jihadi John appears to be but a few city blocks from a large building marked “ISIS Main HQ.” Does the question not immediately arise in your mind why we would target a specific human enemy and yet leave perhaps hundreds of them alive and well to continue to conduct their war against us?

Will you please explain this strategy, Mr. Commander-in Chief?

Crossposted at American Thinker

It was Friday evening, and I was listening to a survivor of the Bataclan Theater terrorist attack in Paris describe how it took place. The attackers wisely seized the high ground, the balconies, where they were able to fire down into the masses of people packed into the overcrowded main floor. According to this witness, the terrorists were able to continually fire their weapons randomly into their helpless victims for ten to fifteen minutes before the police assault finally took them down.

Listening to that, my first thought was this: what if the members of that audience, who were all unarmed by French law, didn’t have to simply wait passively to be random victims? What if Paris was a city that permitted concealed carry? In an audience of more than a thousand, perhaps one in twenty might have been packing. That’s more than fifty citizens who could have been returning fire on those terrorists. Sure, it would be handgun rounds against automatic rifles and possibly shotguns, but trust me, those three shooters wouldn’t have been randomly shooting helpless fish in a barrel had they had incoming rounds from that many firing points – even from half that many. When they were able to raise their heads over the balcony rails, they would have been targeting those citizen shooters instead of killing the helpless…or they might have fled in the face of return fire, as terrorists sometimes do.

The growing body count as of this writing is 120 slaughtered in the Bataclan. We’ll never know how much that body count could have been reduced if the foolish French allowed their citizens to go armed. Their imprudent gun control laws contributed to unnecessary carnage.

Once again, when seconds counted, the police were just too many minutes away.

Crossposted at American Thinker

During those years when I was coming to realize that all my television news and much of my print news were becoming increasingly biased toward the Democratic Party, I began to pay closer attention to all media that came my way to see if the trend encompassed more than just news organizations. One publication that was a bit slower to jump on the Jackass bandwagon, but was showing the by-now familiar signs, was the AARP magazine. Once I began to more closely scrutinize this free monthly publication, to actually read it instead of tossing it on the bathroom stack, it became clear that the Democrats had developed the means to insidiously place their liberal propaganda into the most conservative of households under the guise of looking out for the interests of senior citizens.

Now, many years later, I am no longer surprised when I read or hear of AARP selling out seniors. Like most of the mainstream media organizations, AARP no longer even tries to hide its blatant bias – but in spite of that, you’ll be amazed at how many conservative seniors are aghast when you point out that their dues and health care premiums are supporting a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.

For those of you who continue to believe in the benevolence of this truly malevolent organization, here’s an example to set you straight.

Jonah Bennett, writing over at Daily Caller, reports that AARP mag had put together an article for Veterans’ Day about six doctors who had signed up for military service later in life. One of these was emergency room physician Mark Plaster, whose bio demonstrates a life of sacrificing for others. The part of that sacrifice that attracted AARP mag was Dr. Plaster leaving behind a lucrative medical practice to serve as a trauma detachment leader in Iraq at the age of fifty. That’s just the kind of person AARP is looking for, right? Right?

Well, yeah, until, that is, AARP editors learned at the last minute that Plaster wasn’t just a Republican like most veterans, a truth they could probably swallow without gagging for the sake of their article. But Dr. Plaster is also a candidate for the U.S. Congress from Maryland, and that, friends, is when their story ran smack up against the implacable reality of their leftist, Democrat politics and their party loyalties. So Dr. Plaster was surgically excised from the article, which still describes itself as an account of six heroes, according to Bennett. Not even for the brief period of their article, nor for Veterans’ Day, could the party hardliners running AARP set aside their political bias to include an account of a good man, an exceptional man, sacrificing for his country, because they simply could not bring themselves to print anything good about a person they consider the enemy. Even the author of the AARP article confessed that it was purely politics.

Now I ask you, my fellow conservative senior citizens, who, despite all evidence to the contrary, continue to think of AARP as a benevolent organization looking out for your best interest, do you not see how appallingly politicized AARP truly is? AARP dues are $16 per year. May I suggest that readers donate that amount to Dr. Plaster’s campaign as a symbolic rebuke to this abhorrent organization?

I just did, and it felt damned good.

Crossposted at American Thinker

Often, I have been called a cup half empty man. Maybe I do see the downside. Whether you see that as good or not depends totally on how you see the world. I am an American, born and bred. Freedom is my birthright. I arrived in this world with a full cup.

Today is Veteran’s Day. Formerly it was Armistice Day, the day marking the end of World War I. The ceasefire starting on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month was to be the end of the war to end all wars or so it was proclaimed. It was a war America and her Army was wholly unprepared for. From practically the ground up we had to raise, house, equip and train a force. A seasoned regular Army of any significance did not exist. Some of those necessities were not accomplished on American soil. In haste to get reinforcements to Europe, many Americans boarded the ships not fully trained. The plan was to complete training in Europe where many of them would fire a weapon for the first time. It certainly can be argued that the Germans had the best Army in the fight and were ultimately defeated because they could not match the reinforcements constantly arriving from America. They were defeated, but probably more accurately they were overwhelmed. I recall a Veteran’s cemetery atop the Koenigstul in Heidelberg Germany that is filled with teenagers not yet 18 years old.

Throughout our nation’s history, Americans whether conscript or volunteer have served as the guardians of our American birthright. Fast forward to the present day and you will still find highly dedicated Americans who want to remain guardians of freedom.

For the first time last night I watched the Republican presidential debates. I may look in again if there is a further thinning of the herd. Among those on the stage is the one who may pick up the mantle as a guardian of our freedom. The job of all presidents for much too long not wholly fulfilled. If our country survives intact until January 2017, and there are days when I seriously ponder that question, we must have a leader who is an unwavering guardian of our birthright, our Constitution, and the rights it guarantees all Americans. Such a guardian has been absent from Washington for many years and never has the light shined brighter on that complete failure than it has in these recent years.

The Veterans honored today have stood valiantly around the world against tyranny and the enemies of freedom. The progressive/communist movement inside our country has gone unchallenged for a decade or more. Looking at the recent progressive shopping list, they are dangerously close to their holy grail – taking away gun rights. Washington’s politicians are focused on their political aspirations, self-enrichment, the political party and practically everything under the sun except their sworn duty to protect and defend the Constitution.

Americans serving in the Armed Services cannot battle the internal threat to our birthright. That is the duty of every citizen including the Washington politicians we supposedly sent there for that purpose. Presently, a majority of Americans do not feel represented in Washington. One of the basic reasons for the American Revolution was an oppressive, non-representative, over-taxing government. It looks to me like we are nearly at the point where we began.

Do you truly want to honor Veterans? Get involved. Take your civic duty seriously. Demand the preservation of your birthright. Send citizen servants to Washington. Rid our country of career politicians who are corrupt to the core. Give the armed guardians of our birthright the citizen support and leadership they deserve.

© 2015 J. D. Pendry American Journal All Rights Reserved