Ted Nugent has many beliefs. And he’s not a courageous enough a musician or lyricist to fit ’em into his songs. He also knows his new smallish audience of bottom-out-of-sight white assholes in wife-beaters and motorcycle gangster colors wouldn’t have it.
Not because of the actual political content. But because, in songs, they would sink a set where all anyone wants to hear is “Cat Scratch Fever” and “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang.”
So here is today’s Nugent bit at the Washington Times, for the second year running, an anti-labor column on the Labor Day weekend. Which takes stones and no heart.
Most people reading it won’t perceive the double paradox this weekend.
Ted performs one of his summer tour wrap-ups in Detroit. He’ll be performing at the DTE Energy Music Center in Clarkston, Michigan, today.
The real purpose of Labor Day is a day for the Democratic Party to celebrate. Labor unions and their members are solidly in the Democratic camp. At every Democratic campaign rally, Big Labor is there.
The National teachers union (NEA), one of the nation’s largest unions, is a rock-solid supporter of the Democratic Party, as is every other large union. The NEA cares more about maintaining taxpayer-provided benefits for its members than ensuring our kids get a world-class education. On the NEA’s watch, test scores have plummeted and dropout rates have skyrocketed.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) has been a solid supporter of the Democratic Party for decades and has had automobile management under its thumb. The end result: Automotive plants have closed all around country. What was once the envy of the world, the American automobile industry has been totaled.
Al Capone-wannabe Richard Trumka [etc] …
Public-sector employees should be banned from joining a union …
The result of the labor movement has been a disaster. Labor unions have not sustained labor but rather have destroyed it …
Ultimately, you get what you bargain for – an unemployment check.
The Ted message: He despises unions, school teachers, and all public sector workers. Unions are responsible for mass unemployment, not the economic collapse of 2008. The unemployed deserve it because they supported unions.
Published on Labor Day. In the evening Ted plays Detroit, where the audience obviously won’t have read this column or hear him cursing them from the stage. Or they’d tar and feather him.
While Nugent’s name recognition in Michigan is still significant, there’s a reason he left it for Texas years ago.
I feel good mocking Ted Nugent’s mediocre “I Still Believe” in the previous post.
870 views/listens as of this post. Which isn’t bad for relatively no publicity and the subject matter. So thanks if you gave it a listen!
One DD colleague commented that he didn’t attribute our economic and national fail to just one person.
Neither do I.
But so far I’ve found it impossible to fit everyone deserving mention into something between 2:30 and 3 minutes long. And make it catchy and amusing enough to get a laugh from those who still have a sense of humor.
And I get a kick out of “Lloyd Blankfein,” as a rock ‘n’ roll song with a lot less voltage, being better than Ted Nugent’s “I Still Believe.”
In Anaheim earlier this summer.
Glorified heavy metal bar band.
Ted’s big song on his faith in the USA, the title of his tour, and this is a
lyric sample: “I’m so [f——‘] alive; I’m so in love with this…
That’s it, along with “I believe in America”? It’s to laugh. He doesn’t even know he’s phoned it in.
“Sing that motherfucker!” Ted yells. The crowd doesn’t. Someone from the bar, in silhouette, hoists a drink to teetotal Ted. At least he still looks like he’s having a lot of fun. Mostly.
Next up — “Motor City Madhouse” — four and change decades old.
How the President can lose to someone who’s nuts in 2012.
The ignoramus/rage vote over conditions goes all for the other side.
Can the Democratic Party sell the fact that the opposition is aimed at destroying Social Security and Medicare? It doesn’t have the best track record selling anything.
In T-shirt pictures:
The party of Ted Nugent vows to stop the war on lemonade stands
Only a soulless bureaucratic punk would authorize or advocate shutting down a kid’s sidewalk lemonade stand. And a normal, thinking, reasoning human being would be incapable of such a callous, power-abusing act of indecency. But in America today, the abject, heartbreaking reality is that such subhumans not only exist – they now infest our government like an evil pod of nonthinking death-row criminals …
Maybe the first thing Mr. Obama should do as proof that he is serious about reducing goony government regulations on business owners is to get his teleprompter gang to set up a statement for him to read that indicates he supports kids who sell lemonade.
Then he should visit Texas, witness how Gov. Rick Perry does it, stop at the first neighborhood lemonade stand he sees and give the young entrepreneur a buck or two to stimulate the economy. Just sayin’.
“Subhumans infest the government like … non-thinking death row criminals” and we know this because they’re attacking children’s lemonade stands.
In this context, “I’m voting for the psychopath” T-shirts aren’t the least exaggerated.
If you cut out the swearing and the tirades, the show would last at least half the duration of last night’s two-hour workout …
We were sort of hoping for something to write home about, if only to shock you sitting in front of your monitor.
So we’ve spent a year in the company of the Nuge and we doubt we will be there for the next show here in town. By the time he got to the big immigration/White House cocksucker speech we wished we were home watching El Topo …
We love Uncle Ted because he at least creates a striking image in a sea of normalcy. Like counter-programming to everything else we see weekly, he reminds us that not all is well in the heart of the average American, beyond politics, and hasn’t been for some time. Before Obama, Bush Jr., Clinton, or even Reagan. Even after a Perry term, things will never be completely “right.”
On the audience:
Random Notebook Dump: When you shoved your hand down the back of your wife’s pants and then winked … in our direction, we knew you were a special person.
Perfect.
Ted’s mentally ill rage bits eventually scuff the shine off the ball of the chrome trailer hitch for even the most hardened.
Flatten the area of Tripoli where it is believed he is holed up with a human shield surrounding him. Kill all those people and get it over with. Implement total war for a week, and cockroach Gadhafi will be entombed in a pile of rubble …
As of right now, no one knows what will be the result of the Mideast rebellions. No one knows – or is telling us – if Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood is behind the scenes bankrolling or fanning the flames of the Mideast rebellions to re-establish the Islamic caliphate …
The Obama administration is backing all of the Mideast rebellions. From Egypt to Libya, there’s not a word of caution from the Obama administration about these rebellions; not a word of caution about what the new political environment will be if the rebellions succeed. The president’s radical America-hating chums obviously continue to influence their community organizer.
Obama administration types are not just throwing caution to the wind by backing these rebellions. They are throwing the world into a potential hotbed of life-threatening extremism …
It would be wise to be very cautious and suspicious of the rebellions in the Mideast. Too many violent rebellions in that part of the world have led to brutal regimes who maintain power through genocide, societal destruction …
Wrong about everything. And stupidly so.
Worth reprinting because the GOP is the party of Ted Nugent. And it’s silent today, unable to react to Libyan news because it means the president’s policy, despite how much it hates the guy, didn’t hurt the situation.
The GOP hated the Libyan conflict because it was its leaders didn’t start and had no power over. And while it loves war in the Middle East, it’s internal logic and hatred of the president prevented it from having any view of events which made sense.
Interesting story from the Wall Street Journal, on the use of military hardware to hunt wild pigs in Texas.
It’s a Ted Nugent thing and illustrates the way the country has sorted itself, irrevocably. Pasadena isn’t anything like the places described in the piece. It might as well be another planet with alien locals and customs with which you’ve no desire to mix. The feeling’s mutual, I presume.
The men advanced in the sweltering, pitch-black night, scanning the landscape with night-vision goggles and armed with semiautomatic rifles fitted with silencers …
The prey in this high-tech hunt: feral pigs in pastures near Madisonville, Texas. Hunters Chuck Coiner and Frank Hahnel, clients of guide service Tactical Hog Control LLC, killed five wild porkers that June night, including a 30-pounder that took five bullets to finish off …
Tactical Hog Control, started in 2009 by Texas ranchers Clark Osborne and Mr. Dreher, is among a handful of next-generation outfitters across the South offering a new style of hog hunting designed to appeal to hunters’ inner commando. Each client on a nocturnal hunt with the two men suits up with roughly $40,000 of military-grade gear, including semiautomatic rifles like the DPMS AR-10 …
“I believe every man in the U.S. has a tactical gene,” said Rod Pinkston, an Army veteran and former Olympic sharp-shooting coach whose Jager Pro guide service conducts high-tech hog hunts in western Georgia. “They’ve always wanted to be a soldier, a SWAT team member. We’re the closest thing to combat that these guys are ever going to experience.”
Well, now, here’s the thing. All these guys, the salesmen and the hog hunters, could join the army. It’s not like opportunities to go overseas and get involved in the real thing are scare and limited only to a select cadre of Nick Furies.
This is Ted Nugent land, too, as the Journal piece makes abundantly clear.
Nugent runs feral hog hunts in Michigan for profit. And when that state moved to outlaw ownership of such hogs, which are deemed an invasive species, Nugent went to the governor to complain.
The ban on hog ownership hits him in the bank account.
The paradox, which Nugent has tried to obscure, is that some of the private hunts, those which keep the hogs on property, have contributed to the problem of hog control in the wild … which, in turn, has led to even more people offering wild boar hunts on their ranches. And to state laws calling for the eradication of the animals.
It’s the definition of a conflict of interest.
And it is here where the Michigan law banning ownership of hogs has struck at one of the planks of Nugent’s hunting business in the state.
Near the end of the WSJ piece:
Messrs. Osborne and Dreher have shot hogs on their East Texas ranches for two decades. Not until 2009 did they start enticing would-be Rambos. Their Tactical Hog Control offers hunters a six-hour hunt, beginning at dusk, for $500.
On Ted Nugent’s summer tour of 2011, the cream puff features reporters and free-lancers of the small newspapers of the nation have found it a lot harder to ignore the truth of him than last year.
It’s because things are very noticeably worse now.
Polarization and raging bigots have made the US government paralytic. So an asshole screaming profanity about destroying said government, all his enemies and the President through megawatt amplification onstage isn’t so damn funny or as delightfully idiosyncratic an exercise in free speech as it was in 2010.
When he shares his political views? That’s entertaining, too, in a borderline frightening way.
He railed on government in general and the president in particular. He invited his audience to storm down to Springfield and take it over. Right after an f-bomb-laced barrage, he remarked that it was nice to see children in the audience …
Next, his bandmates – all in helmets now – recreated the famous photo of troops raising the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima. It was a strange thing to tag on at the end of a concert. But in true Nugent fashion, they triumphantly waved their machine guns …
Nugent is ranting at a furious pace, cramming in more obscenities in three minutes than a roomful of cursing sailors, and undoubtedly saying something shockingly funny, or just shocking.
On Tuesday, many of Nugent’s rants were directed at Canadian visitors. Standing in front of a huge backdrop of the Stars and Stripes, Nugent invited Canadian visitors to “taste freedom.” Nugent later quipped, “I love you Canadians, it’s your government that is (fucked) up.” I am paraphrasing of course, but you get the picture.
There was also a massive one-finger salute to President Barack Obama, for which Ted pulled both hands away from his guitar and thrust two of his middle fingers in the air …
For the grand finale, the band donned military helmets and recreated the famous flag-raising scene at Iwo Jima …
All the reviews have one thing in common. The reporters rate as good only Ted’s old music and shtick, the last part meaning him shooting a flaming arrow into a target during “The Great White Buffalo,” a song which was in his set when he still called the band the Amboy Dukes.
The new stuff is not commented upon. And there’s no getting around the barrage of cursing and damnation leveled at over half the country, foreigners and the government.
The headlines are sometimes polite code for “questionable show” in newspaper rooms.
Nugent is also traveling to Madison, Wisconsin, where it’s now become impossible to ignore his animosity toward unions, teachers and those who mounted the recall against the state’s Republican legislators.
National musicians from Tom Morello to Arlo Guthrie to Ted Leo supported Wisconsin’s union protest movement earlier this year.
Now a musician is coming to town to declare that “government employees are rip-off artists that demand more than they produce.”
Unions? [Ted Nugent] says they’ve brought America to its knees …
Q: On the topic of politics, this year Wisconsin substantially limited the collective bargaining rights of public employees. There were intense protests against this at the state Capitol in February and March. Do you think public employees should have the right to collectively bargain, or do you see unions as too powerful a force in the public sector?
Nugent: “Overall, unions in America have brought this great country to its knees. The NEA has seen to it that American kids are the dumbest kids ever, the auto industry was raped, and government employees are rip-off artists that demand more than they produce. What’s not to despise?”
“The guitar rocker strikes harsh political notes,” reads the subhed.
Believe, at a newspaper the size of this one, it’s as close as a features editor can come to saying, “Jesus H. Christ, what’s with this guy!?”
Here’s Ted Nugent, performing “I Still Believe,” the title song for this tour, in some dive.
While not horrid, you wouldn’t go out of your way to see it. It’s teetotal Ted playing for an audience of white guy drunks with a band a bit better, but not a lot better, than the hard rockers who aren’t famous on off nights in the same place.
This, on the other hand, is not spitefully vindictive, old or embarrassing.
And in it’s snappy drumming take down it destroys stuff like phonus-balonus “I Still Believe” songs and an ass’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.”
Laughter is a far better as remedy and entertainment than mechanized spite.
In Friday’s database crash, emergency backup eliminated the post: “The Party of Howard.”
But it didn’t kill it from my records, so republished, here it is.
UPDATED
[If] you’ve read the Ted Nugent tab for the last two years, [the next bit from the wires is no surprise.]
This is what President Obama seems constitutionally unable to grasp. That even if they are a sometimes useful foil, and (sadly) sometimes equally useful in getting him the policy results he wishes, by definition the Tea Party brigade sees any compromise as evil, because everyone to the left of Pat Buchanan is viewed as a mortal threat to their imagined perfect society, which looks a lot like Utah.
With fewer minorities. And a lot more Jesus …
[Any] compromise, no matter how small, is seen as an act tantamount to treason, which is precisely why we need to stop engaging these tottering tea lovers, because they simply do not believe in the workings of democracy.
The Republican Party is no longer the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, or even Reagan – the GOP in its current form is nothing more than the party of Ted Nugent – hopefully with somewhat better hair.
It’s true.
Barack Obama doesn’t understand the level of hatred aimed at him every night from the stages of Nugent’s summer rattletrap tour through the heartland. And, by disposition and mental bent, this is the personality he is up against in the GOP House.
I’ve taken two years to follow Nugent on DD blog.
He’s unrelenting and the substantial public record shows him seemingly without a single shred of simple human decency. There’s no bargaining with such a mind, only complete surrender. Like the Tea Party, it’s all Nugent’s way. Everyone else, anyone with differing beliefs, needs to to be run off, destroyed, hit with a crowbar, beaten, hunted down, imprisoned or put to death for the sake of the country.
Last year I proffered a book idea for a modern biography of Ted Nugent as a parallel parable for our times, when lunatic unpalatable extremism, that which was totally unacceptable a decade or so ago, became tolerated and embraced in the mainstream. No one was interested.
Many people, including those in the mainstream media, have no idea how radical and offensive Ted Nugent is because they’ve never bothered to read his columns and track down everything the man’s said when he thinks people not in his core audience aren’t paying attention.
Nugent has paraded around on his summer tours of our dives (and I know the territory firsthand) for the last two years.
The jaunts take him to all the one and two-horse town fairgrounds in the heartland, where he curses out the president, foreigners, minorities, Muslims, everyone not like him and everything a modern society would consider decent and good, from the stages.
Mostly, the locals never complain because Nugent’s audience, those who come for the riffs, are uniformly lower middle and lower class white trash assholes who get in free on county fair omnibus tickets. It’s a demographic that never buys the new records he makes.
However, Nugent also takes the time to peddle his views in the capitol’s Tea Party paper, the Washington Times, and to parlay himself onto regular appearances on Fox and even CNN.
Add to this the people who put Nugent in in the small newspapers of the heartland every week — music journalists/stringers who have generally called the man some manner of quaint, one who is “opinonated??? and “conservative,??? a polite and intelligent person.
Invariably these tyros always ask Nugent if he’s going to run for office. And he always begs off on answering. In any case, Nugent doesn’t have to run for office in 2012. Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, or some other odious GOP reptile, will do the job.
Most of what I have written has shown how Nugent’s most bankable commodity is his role as an outdoorsman’s Glenn Beck. It has nothing to do with his music and everything to do with his reactionary views.
The views are totally unacceptable in a reasonable or thinking human being with a heart.
However, Nugent’s been mainstreamed in the last couple years. You can find him semi-regularly on CNN, where they bring him in for being a colorful character, and regularly on Fox.
Ironically, or stupidly, he’s often on Huckabee because saintly Mike likes to play a pantywaist’s version of old classic rock tunes with long-in-the-tooth rockstars.
The last time Nugent was on Huckabee it was before an old white audience, people who would have never gone to see him, as I and other reprobates did regularly, in the Seventies and Eighties.
When Nugent’s in front of such audiences, an older Tea Party demographic that loves to hear his views on stamping out the parasites and bloodsuckers (words he loves) bringing down America, he stifles the four-letter words for fifteen minutes.
Here’s a chance to spend a day in the outdoors with legendary rock star Ted Nugent the Whackmaster himself at his Waco, Texas compound.
The iconic madman and avid hunter has put a day of hunting and fishing for two lucky fans at his compound on the auction block at leading charity auction site Charity Buzz .
The auction is an effort to raise funds for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital through the Eric Trump Foundation’s online auction.
The lucky winning bidder and a guest with join Ted Nugent, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump Jr. for a day they’ll never forget.
The current standing bid is $5,250. The experience, valued at $30,000, is open for bidding through Aug. 8th …
Endure a day with Ted? Wouldn’t you just give the research hospital the money and pass?
We need more smart bombs, more predator drones, more advanced intelligence equipment and assets, more special-operations teams and more improved tactics, more ammo, better night-vision equipment, more human-intelligence capabilities, more stealth and a never-ending commitment to kill the enemies of freedom and America under whatever rock they may try to hide. Kill ‘em all as quickly as possible. That’s the most effective deterrent there is …
America is a peaceful nation.
“Sixty-years ago … Hiroshima and Nagasaki were flattened with atomic bombs,” Nugent writes. Never has so little been furnished by one so small.
“Mostly agree, Mr Nugent …. However, make that fifty six years ago, not sixty,” writes one of Howard’s equally arithmetic-challenged pals in the comments section.
As a fellow musician and human being, it is for me to pass judgment on Amy Winehouse’s dumb choices … I believe it is the responsibility of all caring people to pass judgment on her self-destructive choices and use them as a painful, graphic example of a ruined life …
