Thomas Frank’s Pity the Billionaire abounds with examples of Tea Party patriots making up American history and concocting stories and beliefs which have zero connection with the real world. In fact, they often go so far as to be the diametric opposite of what is common experience.
Example:
There is no better instance of this erasure than the enormous rally held in West Virginia on Labor Day 2009 for the express purpose of announcing the solidarity between coal miners and the coal mine operators … The get together feature the protest favorites Sean Hannity and Ted Nugent and was presided over by Don Blankenship, the CEO of Massey Energy, a pollution-spewing strike-breaking mogul of the old school. Dressed in American flag clothing and boasting that the gathering had cost him “a million dollars or so” Blankenship took the stage and declared he was there to “defend American labor because no one else will” … Eight months after that rally, 29 workers in Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine were dead from a huge underground explosion … Now when we find a mine operator claiming that his own struggles against regulation are actually the struggles of mine workers — workers who are then killed because mine regulations are not properly observed .. we have stumbled upon a near perfect example of what the sociologists call “complete horseshit.” The man’s ideas are so contrary to reality …
DD blog briefly wrote about this “Labor Day” celebration, called Coalstock, here.
The country is a mess because of the perverted deceptions of socialism that are founded in Marx, Lenin and communists like the left’s hero, Saul Alinsky, not because of our Founding Fathers, who believed in freedom and liberty …
“The less government control over individuals and our businesses, the more individuals and America prospers,” Nugent adds.
It is not Wall Street and financial gambling that created the economic collapse of 2008 and the subsequent ongoing depression, oh no. It is the American followers of Marx, Lenin, and some guy Ted Nugent had never heard of until Glenn Beck told his tv audience that the alleged teachings of the man were behind vast anti-American conspiracies.
Ted Nugent at Don Blankenship’s Coalstock Labor Day party.
“Blankenship was forced to retire after the 2010 explosion that killed 29 workers at a Massey mine in West Virginia,” reads a brief news story in 2011 on an attempt to get back into the coal industry. “The United Mine Workers of America calls his formation of a new coal company ‘a travesty’ … The union says Blankenship belongs in jail.”
Representative Todd Akin, he of “legitimate rape??? infamy, even said earlier this month that the federal government should stop financing the National School Lunch Program altogether. That man is just a font of humanity.
I vow that I will use our freedom to get these dirty c**k s**kers out of the White House. The president is a bad man. The vice president is a bad man. They’re all bad people. If you don’t get that, you’re a dead mo**erf**ker. If you don’t get that, get out of Texas. Move to Illinois.
This is an illegal Gibson guitar, the game warden told me it was illegal. They’re soulless p**sies. Those spineless, soulless pieces of sh*t from the Wildlife Agency should take me down now, because all of my Gibsons are made of dangerous species. This one is made of platypus! My audience will beat them within an inch of their lives. Is that illegal?
And I can’t wait for the man’s annual Labor Day column cursing labor at the WaTimes next weekend.
Billionaires alleged to be harmed by “socioeconomic lynching.” They “feel like they’re the victims.” Well, they can always go to Galt’s Gulch and we’ll all die and they’ll be able to come out.
“Is there an all clear signal? … What about the wealthy who think they’ve been victimized a lot?”
Near the end two of the shoeshiners snap to their senses and briefly say they’re unsure they believe all the rot about the victimization of the wealthy.
What the Democrats want to do is to play class warfare, pit rich against poor … The Democrats abhor success. They would rather Americans be beholden to Fedzilla for food stamps and other government programs than go out and become tremendously successful on their own.
The Democrats hate success … The “man??? keeping down the people is not a successful person such as Mr. Romney, but rather the Democratic Party, which buys their votes by enslaving its supporters with government programs and checks, funded with the tax dollars that people like Mr. Romney have paid.
Support American jobs and businesses. Buy a Gibson guitar and throttle some good old American R&B love songs of defiance.
Nugent plays Gibsons and the entire column is a rant about the government investigation into Gibson’s illegal importing of ebony, something every other guitar company manages to avoid getting into trouble over. (For the record, the government recently signed an agreement with Gibson letting the company off the hook on the condition that in the statement of fact it essentially admitted it had violated the law. It was a decent deal.)
Gibson employs more people in China, Korea and Indonesia than it does in the US. It’s US manufacturing is for the high end of the market. All American guitar manufacturers abandoned US production for the low and middle markets, the meat of the business, over a decade ago. All of it was sent to China.
The pricing of its domestically made product, and the company’s move into China exploded the demand and market for counterfeit Gibson guitars. Documented on YouTube, many American buyers show little brand loyalty to the firm, even wanting to buy counterfeits, because of the current state of guitar manufacturing.
For months they have watched their plant being dismantled and shipped to China, piece by piece, as they show teams of Chinese workers how to do the jobs they have dedicated their lives to.
“It’s not easy to get up in the morning, training them to do your job so that you can be made unemployed,” said Borman, pictured, a mother of three who has worked for 23 years at the Sensata auto sensors plant …
Borman knows her eventual fate in the stricken economy that surrounds Freeport. “I am going to be competing for minimum wage jobs with my own daughter,” she said.
Such scenes have been common in America as manufacturing has fled abroad in search of cheaper wages.
But, in the midst of the 2012 presidential election, Freeport is different. For Sensata is majority-owned by Bain Capital, the private equity firm once led by Mitt Romney, that has become a hugely controversial symbol of how the modern globalised American economy works.
The middle class blames Congress as the lead culprit for its demise, but blames itself least of all. While 62% of middle class respondents to the Pew survey blamed Congress for their worsening state, 54% blamed banks and financial institutions, 47% blamed corporations, 44% blamed the Bush administration, 39% blamed foreign competition and 34% blamed the Obama administration. Just 8% of all respondents blamed the man (or the woman) in the mirror.
An inexact metaphor for the middle class’s election choices during the last few decades — good at self-destructive dick biting.
Here’s the current list of washed-up angry white guy musicians who really really hate the president:
Hank Williams, Jr. — He compared the president to Hitler on Fox and had his music canned on Monday night football. This inspired his new album of mostly hating on Obama tunes. He gave the record away on YouTube which didn’t make it any less the dud.
Onstage in Iowa, over the weekend, a quote: “We’ve got a Muslim president who hates farming, hates the military, hates the U.S. and we hate him!”
A few days earlier washed up white thrash metal guitarist Dave Mustaine of Megadeth tells an audience in Singapore the president was behind recent mass shootings. When this is publicized Mustaine continues the nutso and white-knuckle ex-drunk act on Alex Jones, roping this all into some UN conspiracy to deprive Americans of guns as well as anything else you can think of. Mustaine’s words, he insists, have been taken out of context by the mainstream media.
And — of course, there is Ted Nugent. Nugent spouts the same weird John Bircher/Tea Party conspiracy crap about UN plotting, too.
No one will pay for Ted Nugent to make records anymore so pretty much all he has left is touring county fairs and casinos during the summer, running celebrity hunts for his cable television show and appearing as an extremist pundit for the right. This year he’s been by the US Secret Service for popping off at the NRA convention. And he has racked up a reputation as a hunting scofflaw after two convictions, one for deer baiting, the other for illegally bagging a bear.
“Williams isn’t the only musician to speak out about politics in colorful ways this month.”
Comparing the President to Hitler, implying he was behind recent massacres, saying if the president is re-elected you’ll be dead, a statement that gets the Secret Service to your door — these are all examples of speaking out about politics in “colorful ways.”
“The president, for the record, is a Christian,” the Hollywood Reporter person adds helpfully.
Only an ignorant, uneducated society will fall for scams such as California banning mountain-lion hunting and turning a thriving black bear population from an asset into an instant liability by banning the use of hounds. Watch the media for reports of increased out-of-control bear-nuisance hysteria now that bait and hounds are no longer allowed to adequately harvest the annual surplus of California’s amazing bear population. More and more mountains of wasted tax dollars will be spent further compensating more ranchers and landowners for destroyed livestock, multiple relocations and ultimately the killing of bears and burying of these precious resources by government-hired killers for guaranteed lose-lose insanity …
The lunatic fringe is winning in California, and that should be a wake-up call to all concerned conservationists that when allowed, logic will be tossed to the wind and conservation will go out the window with it.
And with two convictions on hunting infractions in the last three years, he now has a reputation as something of a hunting scofflaw.
As for southern California and wildlife, we have a lot of it. Pasadena has raccoons, skunks, opossums, coyotes and the infrequent bear strolling into neighborhoods for trash and pool swimming in the housing developments up against the mountain.
There is no evidence of hysteria in the locals. In fact, pretty much everyone likes such stories.
However, you shan’t want to miss this bit of smart phone video from Nugent at the House of Blues.
It’s a grenade. So fast forward to 12:15. I won’t spoil it for you.
Earlier in the summer Ted’s drummer was arrested for DWI with a golf cart. If you had to do that routine every night to earn a living, you might do the same thing.
Ted drummer: Uncle Ted, do we have to do that tonight?
Ted: STFU, I sign the checks and I salute our soldiers. You won’t be a lazy anti-American bloodsucker as long you’re in my band!
Ted drummer: But my daughter says her friends have all seen it on YouTube and make fun of her! She says they tell her we look like a bunch of old fools playing army and no one knows what it means.
We have more in common with Greece than most of us believe. In fact, our situation may be worse than Greece, which is the quintessential definition of modern economic doom …
Few of our politicians are willing to even discuss the drastic cuts in spending that would be required just to begin to put America back on the right path. Our politicians would rather ignore the problem and be re-elected by an ever-increasing population of America- hating bloodsuckers …
Voters, at least half and especially those without white skin, now deemed “bloodsuckers.”
Number of times Ted Nugent has called groups or individuals “bloodsuckers” — cited on blog — and universally.
Framing.
The result was anything but righteous and just — as employees tried to hide their ability and exhibit their need — as competition turned from one of achievements to one of sores — and the best men took the role of suckers, and the worst of bloodsuckers. — Essays on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged
It didn’t take us long to see how it all worked out. Any man who tried to play straight, had to refuse himself everything. He lost his taste for any pleasure, he hated to smoke a nickel’s worth of tobacco or chew a stick of gum, worrying if someone had more need for that nickel. He felt ashamed of every mouthful of food he swallowed, wondering whose weary night of overtime had paid for it, knowing that his food was not his by right, miserably wishing to be cheated rather than to cheat, to be a sucker but not a bloodsucker. He wouldn’t marry, he wouldn’t help his folks back home, he wouldn’t put an extra burden on the family … But the shiftless and irresponsible had a field day of it. They bred babies, they got girls into trouble, and dragged in every worthless relative they had from all over the country, every unmarried pregnant sister, for an extra disability allowance, they got more sicknesses than any doctor could disprove, they ruined their clothing, their furniture, their homes — what the hell, ‘the family’ was paying for it. They found more ways of getting in need than any of us could imagine — they developed a special skill for it, which was the only ability they showed. — Atlas Shrugged
Hey DD, what can be done about foul-mouthed losers who stink up our public spaces?
You must mean Ted Nugent. He curses a lot. In fact, Ted can barely get through any conversation with anyone without dropping multiple profanities. He does it on television and on stage at county fairs through megawatt amplification. Sometimes the locals, having thought they booked family entertainment, object.
Abuse of profanity in everyday conversation shows many things, none of them good: Poor self-control, a weak mind, lack of public speaking skills, lack of consideration for others, and a poor vocabulary. There are many better ways to be emphatic and insulting than crutch-like reliance on simple-minded cursing. — from a new syndicated column, the gaily titled, “Ask DD.”
Saturday has turned into an embarrassment of riches. Between the new Gekko/Galt ticket and Ted Nugent’s campaigning for it, the laughs just keep coming.
Ted Nugent:
We are heartbroken that the basis of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the 10 Commandments and the Golden Rule has been abandoned for a terrible socialism that has ruined every life it’s come in contact with …
Everybody dead in Aurora was unarmed and helpless. Everybody dead in Milwaukee was unarmed and helpless … That’s what gun control is . . . It’s literally opening the door as wide as possible for evil to do to unarmed and helpless victims what they want.
Mitt Romney made the terrible mistake of banning a certain type of firearm in the past — what they call assault weapons, which is not what they are. But he has seen the light … I spoke with him at length. I am convinced in my absolutist Second Amendment heart and soul that Mitt Romney will never even consider any more infringements on guns, ammo, fire power, access of guns ever again for Americans. He’s learned his lesson … Compared to Barack Obama and his team, Mitt Romney is indeed Michael the Archangel.
Nice bit slyly referencing the Prez as Satan, Ted. Never saw that one coming, no sir.
In it Nugent also espouses the crackpot’s Agenda 21 theory that the UN is conspiring to take small arms and everything else away from American citizens. Developed by the John Birch Society, it has crept into the mainstream as part of the awesome parcel of insane rubbish believed by Tea Party Republicans.
