12.24.12
Merry Christmas, signed The Ogre
These two hit the DD blog news feed with 24 hours of each other.
It’s hard to know which is worse, a Ted Nugent Xmas e-card or his delusion that he’s taken for a warm human being.
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12.19.12
Economic stimulus in WhiteManistan
From the wires, during the last couple hours:
Gun shop owners say the increase in gun sales is related to consumers who fear the possibility of future restrictions or bans on weapons.
David Willis of EJW Outdoors Inc. at 4667 Arendell St. said Tuesday his store has seen a marked increase in gun sales for every caliber across the board. — Morehead City, NC
The 4,166 criminal background check requests for gun deals Virginia State Police received last Saturday, the day after the Newtown, Conn., shooting massacre, was the highest volume the agency’s registered since the state began running checks in 1989 …
Even so, a 42 percent increase in transactions — they represent the number of checks requested, not guns sold — the day after a gunman killed 20 children and 6 adults at a New England elementary school is attention-grabbing. — Richmond, VA
Sam Bishop stood Tuesday at the counter of Sharp Shooting Indoor Range and Gun Shop. He was looking at a gun for home security while he felt he still could, he said. “I want to be just one step ahead of everybody else,??? said Bishop, who was checking out the Spokane gun store’s selection of pistols
Spokane gun stores are reporting increased sales since the Newtown, Conn., school massacre Friday, which has sparked talk in Congress of potential gun control legislation. Sales already appeared to be up in 2012 before the latest tragedy. — Spokane, WA
Dobson and other local gun shop owners said fear of gun control has fueled sales since a school shooting Friday. Meanwhile, legislators and advocacy groups such as CeaseFirePA call for tighter gun restrictions and some retailers suspend sales of an assault rifle similar to one used in the Connecticut massacre.
Dobson, who owns West York Sporting Goods, said his store has been busy with customers who are “concerned only criminals will have guns” and they’ll be defenseless. It takes more guns, not fewer, to make a safer society, he said.
“(Lanza) could’ve used gasoline instead of guns,” Dobson said. “He would’ve had another way to kill people. He could’ve driven a car through the school or run over them in the parking lot. What happened is really terrible. It does bother me. [But how comes it doesn’t sound like it really bothers you?] But gun control is not the answer.”
Dobson said he’s afraid the massacre was an opportunity for President Barack Obama and those in favor of gun restrictions to push their agendas. — York, PA
At Staudt’s Gun Shop in Harrisburg, owner Joe Staudt says he sold out his usually large stock of semi-automatic weapons by Wednesday …
Sheriffs around the state report a sharp increase in applications for permits to conceal a handgun or carry one in a vehicle. — (AP) Harrisburg, PA.
Greg Apple is selling a lot of semiautomatic rifles …The guns on display at the Portland Expo Center are various models of the AR-15, the military-style rifle that one gun lobby says is “among the most popular firearms being sold.???
The 41-year-old Apple sips a Pyramid beer and urges people to buy now. The state of Oregon or President Obama, he says, could ban these guns in a matter of days.
But the national cascade of grief has had an inverse effect on buyers at the Portland gun show: The more horrified the nation became as news spread about Friday’s shooting in Connecticut, the more heated the sales of guns—especially the AR-15. [Portland, a few days before the Newtown massacre, had another multiple murder by a white man with an AR-15].
Customers are buying Bushmasters so fast that stores have trouble stocking it. “We sold 14 yesterday,” says Ross Meyer of Gunworld & Archery in Elko, Nev. “That’s way up. All of our suppliers are out of them.”
According to CBS4 news partner the Miami Herald, gun stores across South Florida are reporting record sales in the wake of the mass murder at a Newtown, Connecticut elementary school last Friday.
The move by some gun owners to buy up as many weapons as possible may accelerate Wednesday when President Barack Obama will announce his plans for new gun control initiative …
He said ammunition has been “at an all-time shortage for the last three or four years, since the President was elected the first time.
“We all have ammunition to sell but we don’t have all the ammunition we would want to buy,??? said Demicco. “Ammunition companies are operating a full tilt and people are stocking up on ammunition not knowing what potential legislation may be in the offing.
“There is tremendous fear of the unknown,??? he said. — Hookset, Connecticut
“Leave us the hell alone,” blurted Ted Nugent on Twitter. But he and his kind won’t leave us, the hell, alone.
As with most things, the cure to this mess begins and ends with the family. Traditional family values have been under siege for decades by our culture of contempt. In the absence of a solid family, the whole thing slowly unravels and rots.
“What ails us is a spiritual bankruptcy of cultural values,” Nugent writes.
Here’s the man of cultural and traditional family values, sampled from only two DD blog excerpts over the past two years:
“Free machine guns for the kids,??? Nugent screamed while wielding what we rightfully assume were real machine guns. This was the Nugent that we had been hearing harried and scared reports about for years now
What followed was the mother of all tirades against the mayor of Chicago, President Barack Obama, most Northerners, gun-haters and every “Chairman Mao motherfucker in the White House.??? We don’t remember hearing this sort of language directed towards Dubya during his tenure in office, at least with not this much volume and hate.
Shit is getting real. He’s preaching. Fuck this and fuck that. He’s railing. It’s awe-inspiring.
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 …
Freedom and guns, enough to gag on. This show was canceled by Discovery, yesterday. Nugent has long been a scoundrel who often benefits in the catering to the worst aspects of US society. It is good for everyone else when he has a bad day.
Ted Nugent, showing citizens from WhiteManistan, how to fire a an AR-15 that can do full auto. “Cool, huh!” Give it some views.
Freedom! Or pathology? Rhetorical, you can’t defend the indefensible. In a desire for a civil society, these aren’t the vitamins of liberty.
A scholarly post shooting down every cliched argument made by the gun right, including those citing the need for more guns, or more god.
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12.18.12
Noted spokesman for WhiteManistan …
“Leave us the hell alone,” tweets twit Ted Nugent. The angry blurt of the white super gun nut, another one of our ogres, who thinks he’s being victimized. Not a shred of human decency. (Keyword Twitter. Inspirational for new Twitter hoax user: DrunkTedNugent.)
Ted Nugent, last week — before the Newtown massacre, but just after a football player shot himself and his wife, and while another massacre with an AR-15 was going down in Portland:
2 million Americans use guns each year to defend themselves from punks and thugs. Access to guns saves an incalculable number of lives each year.
Over the last two years this blog has documented every wretched thing from Ted Nugent. Nugent epitomizes a bleak right wing ideology that encompasses a withering and merciless contempt for others, a mainstreaming of hate and its employment as good entertainment and valid political discourse. It became his career.
Readers may be very pleased to hear Nugent’s cable show on heavy weapons shoots at his Waco ranch, Ted Nugent’s Gun Country, was sacked by the Discovery channel today.
Reality tv for the Psychopath Vote. Or to paraphrase Paul Fussell, catering to the audience of shallow pocket that gets erections dreaming about shooting or shoving a bayonet into someone foreign or liberal, preferably smaller and not white.
The more indecent and infamous Nugent gets, the more atrocious television he makes. Like a perpetual motion machine of BAD — that which is puerile, odious or both, publicized as if it is the opposite, a defiantly burning example of freedom and liberty.
A show devoted to showing how tricked up semi-automatic long range assault rifles and machine guns to shoot antelope, pop mannequin heads and blow up vehicles. In case you’re attacked by zombies or, uh, real people. What a pitch that must have been.
As said previously, I grew up in a community of hunters. But there came a point where excess became celebrated simply because it was excessive. And now all the straining white flab in too-small camouflage clothes, all the paramilitary gear, the creepy obsession with private ownership of heavy weapons by men who rant about tyrannical government, just shows the rest of the world how psychotic much of this country has turned.
This is accidentally turning out quite well for a photo collage.
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12.17.12
The WhiteManistan routine
Today starts with Ted Nugent because he is so emblematic of the twin problem of WhiteManistan and the gun lobby. In his many public statements and columns Nugent has never shown even the slightest basic human decency. And this weekend was no exception.
Nugent showed no believable sorrow over the Newtown massacre in an interview for the crazy right wing website, Newsmax. He just went off, with his usual horrible inappropriateness, delivering the gun lobby script that more people need to be armed to defend themselves when the shooter arrives.
Indisputable statistics show clearly that gun free zones around the globe are always where the most innocent human lives are slaughtered,??? insists Nugent, who is on the board of the National Rifle Association.
“The document [sic] genocide in Rwanda, Sudan, Germany, Norway, Scotland, England, Canada, North and South Korea and elsewhere prove them wrong again and concludes that people everywhere forced into unarmed helplessness will always be victims of violent crime.???
In the rest of the bit — you can check, if you wish — Nugent essentially suggests schools now be protected with an armed platoon composed of teachers trained to repel attacks. It’s beyond nauseating, an insane recommendation showing a board member of the gun lobby who has no interest in retaining a civil society and zero compassion for anyone in the massacre.
I could dissect the weird insinuation that mass gun ownership could have stopped “genocide” in a number of countries. England? Canada?
Where does he get these?
But Nugent has no grasp at all of the history of how Hitler seized power in Weimar Germany prior to World War II. To argue with someone who thinks that all that was needed was for Germans to have lots of guns is the same as taking up a discussion with a wooden table.
However, this is the story that is coming out of WhiteManistan. For way too long average people have declined to look at, or consider even slightly how we have come to accept as normal, logical and legitimate the paranoid manias concerning weapons ownership and civil rights which simmer in the juices of tribe of extremist GOP right/gun nut.
Mr. Chauncey Devega at We Are Respectable Negroes describes it thusly:
Apparently, if the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary had an M-4 assault rifle the massacre in her school would have been prevented. Today, an Indiana man was caught with 47 guns in his home and was in the midst of preparing for his own murder rampage at a nearby school. An Oklahoma high school student was planning his own murder rampage and was apprehended on the same day as the Newtown massacre.
The gun is a fetish object. It is also a tool that can be used for good or evil. It has freed countries. The gun has killed dictators. The gun has allowed small numbers of people to control many more than their number on the plantation, in the coal mine, in the sweatshop, or the forced labor camp. The gun allowed one man to kill 20 children and 6 adults in Sandy Hook Elementary School. The gun, in the hands of a teacher or a child in that same circumstance, would have offered no guarantee of their survival.
In his dreams of Call of Duty and other cartoonish video game violence, Texas Representative Louie Gohmert imposes his post hoc counter-factual onto the shooting massacre in Sandy Hook. To him, if more folks had the capacity to effortlessly shoot and kill like a character out of either a bad 1980s action movie, or a John Ford western, then Adam Lanza would have been stopped cold in his tracks.
Devega then goes on to deliver some unpleasant statistics taken from wartime gun battles. And if you read the rest of Devega’s posts he makes the point that “America has an angry white man problem,” one that’s been obvious for a good long time.
On Sunday I wrote the gun lobby, in being part of the DNA of GOP extremism, can be beaten because its numbers — like those of the Republican Party — are in decline. This is partly masked by the staggering number of guns owned in the US, a situation even more distorted by the fact that it is only a distinct minority that is stockpiling arms.
From the New Yorker, over the weekend, on a riff similar to Sunday’s post:
If you want to understand why the gun debate can occasionally feel rigged, this is the answer: the issue is characterized by a conspicuous asymmetry of fervor. The N.R.A. has only four million members—a number that is probably dwarfed by the segment of the U.S. population that feels uneasy about the unbridled proliferation of firearms. But the pro-gun constituency is ardent and organized, while the gun control crowd is diffuse and easily distracted. In the 2012 election cycle, N.R.A. spending on lobbying outranked spending by gun control groups by a factor of ten to one.
What that means in practice is that in the aftermath of contemporary gun tragedies, we don’t see new gun legislation. What we do see is a spike in gun sales. After the shooting last summer in Aurora, Colorado, gun sales went up. After the Giffords shooting, there was a surge in purchases of the very Glock semiautomatic that wounded her. Certainly, the firearm industry and lobby will confront some bad P.R. in the coming weeks, but they can likely find succor in an uptick in business.
And, indeed, this has already happened. Seemingly even before all the blood was dry, white people were rushing to gun stores, as indicated in news stories here and here. (Here’s the astonishing daily collection.)
All for the deadening usual reasons: Barack Obama is coming to take their guns. And, even more laughably, out of fear, the idea being, one supposes, that they will accompany their tots to school today with a couple sidearms under the winter wear, perhaps to stand guard on watch for the next Adam Lanza, ready to fill him with lead.
The ludicrous, but profoundly depressing image, is of white parents making up Ted Nugent’s armed elementary school defense platoons, signaling the complete failure of American society.
Here’s a Texas man, buying new guns to protect his children:
“I’ve got two girls, and actually, I’ve got a five-year-old. So, it really hit home with the age ranges of these kids, and it really haunts me …
“I’m always going to check it at hospitals, banks, schools … I have respect for the fact that, if a friend doesn’t want me carrying it in his house, I won’t carry it. I’ll check it at the door. I’ll of course give my spiel to a friend, but anywhere that law forbids it, I don’t carry.”
“Yesterday was the biggest day we’ve seen in 20 years,??? reads this bit from San Diego NBC, proffered by “Karl Durkheimer, owner of Northwest Armory said Sunday.”
“Today will probably eclipse that,??? he added.
If you dwell too long on the bleak absurdity encapsulated in these beliefs your brain begins to evaporate. Here are white people, stockpiling arms because they say now they are afraid of an Adam Lanza in their neighborhood, who got his AR-15 and ammo from his white mother, who stockpiled arms.
No one I know rushed out to buy guns over the weekend.
This is a response of only a certain segment of US society, one that is not representative of the whole any longer.
But the only way to make change is for someone with the national stage to make the arguments and keep them on the front burner. The President has that power.
He could be a do-nothing as is often his wont. Or he could actually back up the words he delivered Sunday. And that will mean getting after the National Rife Association.
Additional notes: This year Ted Nugent got a famously publicized visit from the US Secret Service after a speech at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting. The Secret Service visits people who they have reason to believe may harbor a desire to shoot the president or be inciting others to do so. And even if the person interrogated is not charged, the visit is not a pat on the back for good behavior.
Ted Nugent, however, is still a board member of the National Rifle Association. Which indicates to reasonable people that the NRA doesn’t care if its leaders and members run afoul of the US Secret Service because of flirtation with language indicating they might like to, well, see the non-white guy in the White House be shot. (And he hasn’t even done his complete WaTimes column this week yet.)
This is ugly stuff and it is possible to tar the NRA with it. Because it is so ugly, WhiteManistan won’t have it. Expect more paranoia.
This morning a reader also noted that Adam Lanza’s mother had been identified as a “prepper” by The Independent, an English newspaper. That piece is here.
The information is brief and still preliminary. However, if it holds it opens a similar but separate and equally troubling can of worms.
Preppers — from the archives.
From a South Carolina newspaper today:
The Herald, a South Carolina newspaper, is facing ridicule and scorn and a barrage of Twitter messages, after it, rather stupidly, allowed a huge three-quarter page advertisement, touting its gun sale offering Christmas discounts on Smith & Wesson assault guns, replete with an image of a laughing Santa Claus, to be placed next to a story of the horrendous school shooting.
The advertisement for a pre-Christmas sale of a variety of weapons, that included handguns and assault rifles, at Nichols Store occupied prominent place on the fifth page of The Herald of Rock Hill, making it hard to accept the editor’ s contention that it was unintentional and unplanned.
“There are many newspapers in the US, that, as matter of principle and business policies do not carry classified ads for gun sales, inspite of being roundly berated by the gun-lobby and gun-owners,” it adds.
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12.14.12
The Big Creep is Silent
Not a tweet.
I grew up among gun lovers. Today I fail to understand how anyone decent could be a member of the modern NRA and not feel very bad about it. Its image is the most horrid of base instinct, dog crap, psychotic illogic, conspiracy theory and inhumanity. It boils down to “Don’t f— with my guns or I’ll shoot you. And if you don’t, maybe I’ll shoot you anyway.???
History has presented America’s belligerent gun owners and the NRA with a problem. And depending on what their loudest mouths say, it could be one that stains them permanently.
Ted Nugent, a week ago, again:
2 million Americans use guns each year to defend themselves from punks and thugs. Access to guns saves an incalculable number of lives each year.
Human beings must turn away.
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12.12.12
What would Ted say?
What he really thought.
With today’s news of the Oregon AR-15 massacre, what would Ted say?
We know.
Just this week, on the last shooting, from the WaTimes:
[Bob Costas], blamed the murder-suicide on easy access to guns. He lives in a strange fairyland of ignorance and denial …
What Mr. Costas didn’t say and possibly doesn’t know is that 2 million Americans use guns each year to defend themselves from punks and thugs. Access to guns saves an incalculable number of lives each year.
A young masked man, bent on a mission of destruction and death, entered an Oregon mall and opened fire, turning the holiday shopping season into a chaotic horror that could have been much worse, police officials said Wednesday …
The man entered the Clackamas Town Center, a popular suburban mall several miles from downtown Portland, on Tuesday afternoon. He was wearing a hockey-style mask and a protective vest and began firing with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, stolen from someone the suspect knew, police said. There were also several magazines of ammunition.
If only more people would carry AR-15s when doing Christmas shopping, perhaps this could have been avoided and the punk shot dead.
Some people are mentally unfit. Ted Nugent is such a person.
The black and bleak humor in this is that it presents Nugent with having to write about another nuts shooting only two days after he ranted about all the idiot liberals who try to destroy American freedom after each massacre.
UPDATE
And now it’s orders of magnitude worse. Why would anyone want to be in any club or organization this man speaks for is beyond understanding.
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12.04.12
The Acceptance of Malice
The mainstreaming of Ted Nugent as a pundit and personality demonstrates a deep flaw in American character — the real enjoyment and approval of those who are defined by their malice toward others.
Ted Nugent is now much of the GOP electorate. He is one of the most recognizable faces of the Psychopath Vote. And it’s why the party is essentially dead except in gerrymandered WhiteManistan.
There is no question that wishing ill on others is just about all that motivates Nugent. It’s his money-maker. One only has to read a year of his columns at the Washington Times and tabulate the various curses and slurs he brings down on others weekly.
Today is no exception. At the heart of his column is the assertion that the poor, those receiving benefits as part of the in-tatters social safety net, should have their right to vote rescinded. While it may seem shocking and reflexively nasty it’s not an uncommon sentiment in 2012 USA.
On election night Nugent publicly choked on his own bile. And he quickly adopted the odious bigot’s theory of everyone else in the the Republican Party’s top rung — the only reason Barack Obama won was because he gave stuff to lots of people, like the Obamaphone. And those people are all leeches, bringing the country down.
The three sacred entitlement cows in the room that no politician wants to poke are Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. A blinding statement of the obvious is that we are never going to get our financial house in order until these sacred entitlement cows are not only poked, but slaughtered …
In addition to slaughtering the three sacred entitlement cows that consume a vast majority of the federal budget (and I use the term budget generously), let’s truly spread the pain around and raise taxes on everyone, including the nearly 50 percent of Americans who pay zero federal income taxes. Those Americans need to have some skin in the game, too. I recommend at least a 5 percent federal income tax bracket for them.
Let’s also stop the insanity by suspending the right to vote of any American who is on welfare. Once they get off welfare and are self-sustaining, they get their right to vote restored. No American on welfare should have the right to vote for tax increases on those Americans who are working and paying taxes to support them.
Ted Nugent is a raging public bigot, full time. It’s his career. He appears regularly on television and lousy cable tv specials made especially for him.
In a civil society Nugent would have no place. But that’s not us. His presence is a symptom of underlying sepsis in the soul, the yen to see others, always the weaker, publicly hurt or destroyed.
Mitt Romney was all right with Ted Nugent, even seeking his approval. So if there is good news in any of this, it is that Nugent is so public and so very obviously a good example of the Republican Party.
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11.21.12
The Sweet Charity of Corporate America
Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and many other good books, has a Facebook account. And she posts regularly.
Yesterday:
Yesterday at a labor event I gave a brief talk on workers’ rights. Very brief: American workers have no rights.
Then, Ted Nugent, who suffers kidney stones, certainly not from eating too much sweet:
Economic lesson No. 1: The reason business is in business is to make as much money as possible. Businesses are not social welfare experiments whose primary responsibility is to provide jobs and meet the demands of ever-shrinking labor unions …
There is good news. In the private sector, labor unions are quickly becoming extinct …
The evidence is clear: Labor unions have a history of destroying companies and jobs, and have done much to kill the economies of states like Michigan, Ohio and Illinois — all states that supported Mr. Obama.
Good news, lads! Good news! When we’re fighting the scrabbling crowds on Friday, no union workers in most places!
Trivia notice: The paperback edition of Kipper’s Game, Ehrenreich’s lone novel (science fiction, it did not sell), features a blurb taken from the old Crypt Newsletter on its back cover!
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11.09.12
Nugent & the Obamaphone
The New Confederacy lost, Ted. But you’ll always have Waco.
Famous last words, from this summer just prior to Nugent getting a visit from the US Secret Service:
If Barack Obama becomes the President in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.
We have decayed into a nation of gluttonous, soulless pigs who feast on whatever Fedzilla provides by taking from one group of Americans (the producers) and giving to others (the takers) who haven’t earned it and don’t deserve it …
The pigs have come home to wallow in the mud of the Washington swamp … And you thought “Planet of the Apes??? was a movie …
The stealth white bigot’s riff on the Obamaphone.
Free cellphones aren’t free. Food stamps have become vote-getting extortion vouchers …
If you voted for Mr. Obama, you are thunderously dumb and incredibly naive … Thanks for nothing, numbskulls.
Twenty years ago, the results would have been different. America wasn’t nearly as stupid back then as we are today.
Bush the Elder lost to Bill Clinton in November 1992. But, yes, the angry white guy had a much stronger proportionate grip on rule then.
Krugman, on the Ted Nugents, the Psychopath Vote:
[What] we’ve just seen is a peek into the modern right-wing psyche, which is obsessed — more than anything else — with power. Policy is one thing; but equally or even more important is the sense of being with the winners, of being part of the team that will stamp its boots on the faces of the other guys.
From the WaTimes, on the state of the GOP in Maryland:
Fresh from decisive losses in seven of Maryland’s eight congressional districts and its worst performance ever in a U.S. Senate race, the Maryland Republican Party is searching for answers to stop its slide into irrelevance in the increasingly deep-blue state.
The party lost one of its two congressional incumbents Tuesday when Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett was defeated in a heavily gerrymandered district, leaving incumbent Rep. Andy Harris as the party’s sole representative in Congress.
Also Tuesday, voters approved ballot initiatives to legalize same-sex marriage and give in-state tuition to some illegal immigrants, despite heavy opposition from conservatives.
Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy grandfather Roscoe Bartlett, who has been in Congress for 20 years, got about 38 percent of the vote in his failed re-election bid. That’s the same as Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern did nationally in the disastrous 1972 campaign against Richard Nixon.
“Party electorate a paltry 26 percent,” reads the WaTimes piece.
He won because he gave the parasites Obamaphones — a white man’s racist group psychosis.
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11.07.12
Nugent’s head explodes
I would have paid a movie fare to see the blood squirt from the corners of Ted Nugent’s eyes like a Texas horned toad before the man collapsed in a heap on the floor in Waco. I have heard Nugent is on an obscure Turkish painkiller called Wallot to control the agony of exploding kidney stones from decades of over-consumption of fatty hog meat and diet soda. Wallot can loosen inhibitions leading to crazy outbursts of reptile-like hissing and subsequent unconsciousness.
And, yes, he did manage to call everyone who voted for Obama a subhuman varmint. The hate is still strong within him.
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