5-8-25

I’m going to get into a story from when I was a kid…..from right here in this

listening area…..I was in 3 rd grade at Chaffee Elementary, and honestly it was not

all a good year for me…..I was in the immediate aftermath of my parents divorce

and still figuring out life….I was a latchkey kid, which is a term that I don’t ever

hear anymore, but basically I walked to school everyday with a house key hanging

on a string around my neck like a weird necklace and then I walked home to my

house and let myself in until Mom got home from work…strange times indeed,

Mom was great, Dad was still my hero, but life felt different…..but my grandfather

was one mainstay…..and I spent a lot of time at their house also….my Grandad

was a retired Army General, lived in SE Huntsville, and had been the Post

Commander at Redstone Arsenal a few years before that…..He taught me to fish,

and play horseshoes, and how to treat a gun like it was always loaded…..life lesson

stuff….and one day he gave me a couple of things….things I found out in his

garage, which in my memory was a giant room filled with all kinds of crazy cool

things that any boy would love to get his hands on…..that garage never had a car in

it because it was too full of Grandaddy’s stuff….there was old fishing tackle, and

parts for his boat, and tools, and memorabilia from 30 years of military service that

spanned from WWII through Vietnam…..My grandaddy was George McBride, he

was a Glider Rider in WWII, starting with the 82 nd Airborne and then the 18 th

Airborne Corps….and one day in the garage while I was poking around in things

that I wasn’t supposed to put my 10 -year old hands on I found a clock….it was

very nondescript….it was a small black clock about the size of a baseball…. very

function over form looking….it was kind of industrial looking, and chunky, with a

square metal frame surrounding the round glassed-in clock face…..and there were

four holes, one in each corner, like it used to be mounted on something….I realized

it was hinged on one side so that it could be opened and that’s how you wound up

the mechanism to keep the clock running…..okay, I was fascinated, so I took it

back inside to my Grandad and asked him why this old clock was out in the

garage….he looked it and thought for a minute and then told me the incredible

story that during WWII he had taken that clock out of the dash of a German

Messerschmitt fighter plane (show pic on screen)….he had used it like a desk

clock for years….and then he gave it to me and told me to take good care of

it….well, that was a personal treasure! Let me tell you….I loved that clock, it was

a symbol of great things….my grandaddy had been in the war and he took that

clock from the bad guys and now it was mine….At some point after that we

actually had a show-and-tell at school….so yeah, I took my bad guy clock to

school and showed everybody, and after that it sat on my desk where I marveled at

it….and then being a kid I couldn’t help but fidget with it…..and then it

happened….the teacher was apparently having a bad day….she decided that I

wasn’t able to handle having the clock with me until the bell rang to walk home

with my key around my neck…..she told me she was taking it up because it was

too much of a distraction…..and over my protests she took my WWII clock and

put it in the teachers work room…when I went to get it after school she told me

that the rule was that anything that had to be taken up like that would be held until

the end of the school year….you heard me, the end of the school year…..my

clock…..so a couple of months later school was out and I went to get my

clock….but in one of the most insensitive, callous and indifferent things I’ve ever

seen it turns out the clock was gone….but it wasn’t just gone….it had been thrown

away….as I was told later it appears that the teachers had been cleaning out the

workroom for the Summer vacation and in doing so no one could remember what

the small chunky black clock was for, or where it came from….they had forgotten

that it had value to someone else…..it was in their care….but they didn’t

care….and they threw it away…..I had to tell my Grandad about it….and I don’t

know if he was mad at me or not….but I do know that he went down to the school

and somebody got an earful from the General…..think about that, they told the kid

to bring his favorite thing to school to show everybody, then they took it, then they

cast it aside……make that make sense….oh, that’s right, you can’t

Okay, so what brought this story up?….well, what triggered that memory today

was a story that I read early this morning as I was prepping for the

show….Townhall.com ran a story that brought something back to mind….another

one of those Biden boondoggles that blows your mind when you think about

it….Remember, Joe Biden has never led a thing in his life, and it was not clear he

was even leading himself toward the end of his presidency…..when Hamas

attacked Israel on October 7 th , 2023 they massacred thousands of innocent civilians

and took hundreds hostage….the war against Hamas in Gaza has been ongoing

ever since….Israel is our ally, but Joe Biden and his team were feckless losers who

didn’t know a thing about what it meant to lead from the front and were always

looking for the way to appease someone, or please everyone….so Biden

announced that he supported Israel, BUT he was also going to ensure that aide and

comfort was given to Hamas….as a part of this fiasco of foreign policy Biden

announced in his 2024 State of the Union that he had directed that the US military

build a floating pier on the coast of the Red Sea…it was called the JLOTS, or the

Joint Logistics Over The Shore pier…….the floating pier was a largely untried

military asset that involved huge floating sections of steel being linked

together….it was a cool idea for use on calm waters, but if you’ve ever read the

Bible you know the Red Sea is anything but calm…..at a cost of $230 million the

floating pier was laboriously assembled in the waves off the Gaza shoreline….

Soon after getting it largely in place, and just as it was preparing to go operational,

rough weather broke away four of the support boats that kept it working and they

were beached and out of commission….later that same week a major storm hit the

area and the Pentagon confirmed that the causeway portion of the floating pier was

damaged and broken off…..the Israeli Navy, at war with Hamas, had to assist the

US in getting the broken portions back into place…..At one point Hamas militants

mortared the installation…..aid trucks tried getting aid across the pier but it was

believed that Hamas was intercepting the aid because after all, it was a war zone,

and bad guys have to eat too…..it was operational for all of 20 days…..but more

importantly is the human toll….because a new report has just been published that

shows that not only did we spend massive amounts of US Dollars on a reckless

endeavor but 62 American servicemembers were injured during the whole debacle,

one of whom (SGT Quindarious Stanley) died 6 months later while under long

term care for his injuries sustained in the building of the 20-day $230 million

dollar pier to feed our enemies…..and then the Biden administration quietly looked

the other way and forgot about it…..they just pretended it never happened….and

they washed their hands of it all and threw it away like it meant nothing….$230

million dollars and the blood of US servicemembers and they cast it all aside like

some kind of trashy little clock found in a corner of the teachers workroom…..and

that my friends is the bigger story….governments spend big money….but what it

awful is when Government becomes indifferent, callous, disorderly,

insensitive….and that story of the Gaza JLOTS pier is like the giant version of my

clock story…..they told the folks to send their money, their young men and

women, and when we did they took them and used them in a way that had never

been considered, and then they wasted the opportunity and then they cast it aside

because they had forgotten what they had…..

This is why DOGE is so important….this is why it is necessary that we not only

put a stop to the reckless use of our greatest assets, our time, our treasure, and our

kids….but at the very least we have to demand that those to whom those things are

entrusted will recognize the value of what they’ve been asked to hold onto…..and

if they mess up, if they make a mistake, if they squander an asset, then don’t for a

second think that we’re going to be satisfied with the answer that “oh, we’d

forgotten what that was and didn’t know what to do with it so we threw it

away”…..

SGT Quindarious Stanley, 23 years old, from Columbia, SC, served with the 3 rd

Expeditionary Sustainment Command at Fort Bragg, he was said to have been a

fine young first line leader of troops….he spent 6 months in Brooke Army Medical

Center before finally succumbing to his injuries….SGT Stanley and his family

don’t deserve to be cast aside…..he should be remembered, and so should the

massive debacle of the JLOTS pier where he and so many others were sent to do a

job that they had no business being sent to do…..

Make that make sense….oh that’s right, you can’t

And that’s a wrap for the Rightside Way…..