Nugent railing with Alex Jones on premier paranoid whacko radio — condensed:
Four judges including two women on the Supreme Court are subhuman racist punks, the Obama administration is guilty of high treason, is Adolf Hitler, are wanna-be Joe Stalins, the government has secret papers or something that say if you have a photo of Ted Nugent in your house you’re a terrorist, the Mao ZeDong fan club is working for Barack Hussein Obama’s Indonesian dream, if there is a revolt and all Hell breaks loose Ted knows most of the military and police forces will side with ‘the people.’
In three parts, virtually unlistenable, I jumped on the grenade for you.
“I’ve written thousands of articles that no one can argue with on tednugent.com,” sez Ted. And “they” use the Saul Alinsky playbook to attack me, he adds.
Ted Nugent is educated, well-spoken and intelligent.
That’s if you discount the run-on sentences and the use of profanity as a crutch — something he used to never do. So about 0.5 out of three is still good, right?
The story informs Ted is prepping two new books — and selling a brand of coffee called Nuge Java. Something every bit as successful as Gonzo Meat Biltong.
Ted Nugent coffee, bound to wipe the floor with the sissy competition at Peet’s. He’s the next Newman’s Own brand. Uncle Ted — best dabbler at dabbling, ever.
Anyway:
Expected to soon join … other popular Nugent-scribed
books on store shelves are two more book projects, a coffee table
photo book glorifying outdoorsmanship, “Blood Brothers,” and a new
biographical tome, “Stranglehold: The Life Story of Ted
Nugent.”
Blog readers should consider getting a review copy of the latter when it hits stores. For DD. Imagine the riches of embarrassment I could find.
Which brings up another possibility.
DD writing an unauthorized biography of Ted Nugent as a study in American extremism.
And how the man went from being an arena-busting draw in late Seventies America — a guitar hero for the class that made stuff in factories — to a dried-up but furious extreme right pundit with a uniquely shriveled and mean viewpoint, a trajectory mirroring the decline of the nation’s reputation and vitality. A man who was one popular symbol for the old muscle of Detroit and Michigan. To someone who left the state for Waco, Texas, after being run off the bill of a big family-oriented summer concert series in 2003.
A rock ‘n’ roll Lyndon LaRouche.
Naturally, DD would not forget to analyze the Nuge’s loss of rock audience.
How did he get banished to playing third tier joints in Lake County, Indiana?
It’d be better than some propped-up Nugent-approved self-glorification, dontcha think?
Calling the Obama government the Mao ZeDong fan club? Check. Insist an African American member of the administration is a racist? Check. Advocate armed revolt? Check. Invocation of GOP whacko paranoid conspiracy theory that DoJ is suing Arizona to enslave illegals and get their votes? Check.
Excerpt:
Fedzilla is suing Arizona to show illegals in America that they have a friend in the District of Clowns. This, of course, is a sham. It is ultimately about getting their support and eventual votes and enslaving them by showering them with all kinds of Fedzilla pork-barrel programs, thereby stripping them of their work ethic and pride. Hey, it worked for many of my black fellow Americans, and we all know how well that has worked out.
If you weren’t some damn Godless commie liberal you wouldn’t think this is so funny!
On a tip from Rick in Pennsyltucky, this laugh out loud essay in the York Daily Record:
Last week, an alert reader called to point out an article in the Arizona Republic about Mexicans flocking to Pennsylvania, apparently hoping to alert the state that hordes of illegal immigrants will soon be overrunning the state and taking jobs from the thousands of Pennsylvanians who dream of, one day, trying to earn a living by picking fruit or mowing lawns.
I almost fell out of my chair. The columnist, Mike Argento, is already making a wry joke in the first graf, one satirically likening Pennsylvania to soCal. Which is actually where illegals fleeing Arizona come.
Argento goes on, at one point revealing:
A bill similar to the Arizona law is pending, introduced recently by some representative from Butler County. Rep. Daryl Metcalfe said, “The purpose of this legislation is to offer every illegal alien residing in Pennsylvania two options, leave immediately or go to jail.”
We’ve always been kinder and gentler here in Penn’s Woods.
The law has no chance of passing and has no chance of becoming law and has no chance of doing anything except elevate Metcalfe in the eyes of his constituents, which, being Butler County, are mostly deer and raccoons.
I guess word hasn’t gotten out about our attempt to join Arizona in hating on the Mexicans yet because nobody is boycotting Pennsylvania over the proposed law …
Tremendous column, you really should read all of it.
Understand that it will generate a certain amount of hate mail in the conservative ‘burg of York, PA.
Southern California has about 10 million people living in it. The entire state of Arizona, much less.
And Butler County, Pennsy, is a flyspeck. But one of those places from the interior which makes outsiders consider the state “like Alabama” between Pittsburgh and Philly (except for Dauphin County, also where African Americans live).
One of the best examples of terror defense research as the equivalent of welfare for scientists is the ricin vaccine.
To be sure, the slow development of a vaccine for ricin is built upon the foundation of good science. However, once you get past the rigor involved, its practical value dissolves into the equivalent of science welfare.
The history of ricin and intended use in poisoning has been well-described many times by this author, here and elsewhere.
It’s a “weapon” of choice for kooks and incompetents. White neo-Nazis in the US, England and Canada are regularly banged up and sent over for a long time for the crime of turning castor seeds into a mush.
The recipe for turning castor seeds into mush containing a bit of ricin is widespread. And occasionally it is even found in the hands of Islamic terrorists, as in one very famous case here.
But there is no way to make ricin into an effective weapon of mass destruction. Despite its toxicity, it’s not quite poisonous enough and not found in quite high enough quantity in the castor seed. And turning castor seeds into powder is not an effective way of purifying it.
And there is no public record anywhere of ricin being made into a WMD, ever — despite the existence of a questionable patent on using ricin as a toxic weapon, one developed by the US government too long ago to be interesting anymore.
As with so many things imagined to be of easy use to terrorists, it is actually easier and more reliable to shoot people, or blow them up, or even strangle them — than to poison with ricin.
Before 9/11 there was no interest in a vaccine for ricin. Man has worked with castor seeds as a renewable agricultural resource for centuries and been no worse the wear for it.
After 9/11 that changed.
And a small number of people have been working on a ricin vaccine ever since. Despite the fact that the only people who might every actually need a ricin vaccine are those who do research with ricin and the occasional nuisance who sickens himself with castor powder.
So, as fruit of the war on terror, one reads — today — of a research paper on a vaccine for ricin:
“Since it is likely that a ricin vaccine would be used in an emergency setting or by the military, the ease of [intradermal] vaccination with jet injectors or similar devices with lower doses of vaccine is rather important,” stated Robert N. Brey, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer of Soligenix. “It should also be noted that ID vaccination was highly effective at protecting the lungs of the mice from ricin aerosols, a likely route of delivery in the setting of bioterrorism.”
It is not a likely setting. The people making the ricin vaccine know it. The only things killed with ricin aerosols are in the labs working toward a finished ricin vaccine.
However, Soligenix is another small biotech company with virtually no product line, one attached to the teat of funding for bioterror defense. It used to be called DOR Biopharma, changing its name a year or so ago, perhaps in a clumsy attempt to snooker potential investors. Like many of the companies mentioned on this blog it is a member of the Alliance for Biosecurity.
“There have been many attempts to develop a prophylactic ricin vaccine, using different preparations of the ricin holotoxin with and without various adjuvants,” stated Dr. Ellen Vitetta, Director of the Cancer Immunobiology Center at UT Southwestern and senior author of the study. “But none of these have been as extensively studied as RiVax™ and none have looked at the ID vaccination route.”
Whoopie! A vaccine of benefit only to the company making it. It’s science welfare, kids!
Another small form of science welfare, one also supported since 9/11, is the attempt to make castor plants ricin free through molecular genetics. Like this charity case waste of time at Mississippi State.
The rest of the world — particularly the big producers of castor products, India and China, couldn’t care less about ricin-free castor beans.
It’s just not an issue. The world doesn’t need a ricin-free castor plant. The castor plant is not a menace.
And it wasn’t even an issue in US castor production, although a couple scientist involved in this work now will try to insinuate it was, when castor seed cultivation was stopped in this country because it simply wasn’t profitable enough.
Over the course of a decade, from 1959 until 1970, Plainview was considered the hub of domestic castor bean production with the local office of Baker Castor Oil ultimately contracting for 70,000 acres of production annually.
However, the crop’s success ultimately worked against it with practically no significant domestic production recorded after 1972. Since that time, the United States has been forced to turn to producers in India and Brazil to supply the majority of its needs.
Plainview Mayor John C. Anderson has a unique perspective on the local castor industry, having served as general manager of Baker Castor Oil’s local operations from August 1959 until December 1970.
“During most of that time Baker was the dominant player in the United States with about 75 percent of the castor oil production,??? Anderson recalled last week, “and the Plainview facilities accounted for virtually all of that.???
The oil derived from castor beans is used in a vast array of products, ranging from paints, varnishes and lacquers to lipstick, hair tonic and shampoo. Since it does not become stiff with cold nor unduly thin with heat, castor oil is an important component in plastics, soaps, waxes, hydraulic fluids and ink. It also is used to make special lubricants for jet engines and racing cars, and during World War I, World War II and the Korean War it was stockpiled by the federal government as a strategic material.
If you disagree with Ted Nugent’s politics, it’s tough to like him. That said, he’s by no means a stupid guy, and his charitable work for military veterans is without a doubt admirable. His opinions are generally well-articulated even if they do often include threats of violence against his critics. But therein lies the rub: Dude’s a fucking prick, and not in that likable-asshole kind of way. No, his general dickishness comes in the way of suggesting Iraq should have been nuked and his frequent suggestions that those occupying the opposite end of the political spectrum should “suck on my machine gun.??? Sure, there are plenty of attendees at a Ted Nugent concert who can’t wait for his inevitable mid-set tirade wherein me might fantasize murdering Hillary Clinton or threaten to shoot that commie Obama in his non-American face, but some of us just want to hear “Stranglehold.???
Such previews are proof it’s impossible to defame Nugent. He may complain loudly in columns that he’s been dubbed a race-baiter unjustly and that people better get their facts straight. But his own persona has created a substantial body of opinion that he is precisely what he says he is not.
In mid 2003 Nugent had a big gig lined up at the Muskegon Summer Celebration in Michigan. He then went on a radio show in Denver to do his inimitably Ted thing. The radio hosts pulled the plug on him.
The result — Nugent summarily dropped by the concert. Billboard, at the time:
“Derogatory racial remarks made by veteran rocker Ted Nugent have cost him a gig at the Muskegon Summer Celebration. Festival officials cancelled his concert following an interview last week with two Denver disc jockeys in which the DJs said he used slurs for Asians and blacks.”
Three months later Nugent sued the Muskegon concert officials for defamation. In his complaint, it was linked to a tortured argument about violation of his 14th Amendment rights and breach of contract, which had deprived him of an $80,000 guarantee.
The Billboard image/article is here in a parcel of articles and comes from the case files entered by Nugent’s legal team. (DD has more and may get to them in a future post.)
The lawsuit became a celebrity trial in Michigan during the course of which Nugent’s defamation claim was tossed out. Nugent eventually took the stand, saying the DJs had misinterpreted his use of the n-word in a conversation. Nugent said he had related a story about how an African American had told him, after watching him in performance: “If you keep playing … like that, you’re going to be an ‘n word’ when you grow up.”
Whether this was all Nugent said during the course of the radio appearance was not determined. No tape of it existed, apparently.
“Unmentioned at the trial were news accounts of Nugent’s use of the other words,” reported the Muskegon Chronicle in 2005.
Continued the newspaper:
Asked about it later by a Chronicle reporter, Nugent said he referred to “Jap guitars” in the context of a conversation about how some guitars are soulful, others not. Nugent said one of the disc jockeys then said the word “Jap” is offensive — a point Nugent disagrees with — and that he jokingly responded something to the effect of, “That’s not offensive. g—–‘ is offensive. [Apparently gooks.]
I didn’t call anybody a g—,” Nugent added.
Nugent claimed a subsequent Rocky Mountain News story about the radio interview — which generated a wire story that ran in The Muskegon Chronicle, launching the Muskegon uproar — was biased and false, although his own account of his on-air words resembled that given in the newspaper story.
By today’s Nuge-standard, it all reads rather mildly.
While the defamation part of the case was dismissed, Nugent was successful in his breach of contract suit. He was eventually paid his guarantee although Muskegon Summer Celebration lawyers had to prod him into admitting it had been settled.
What had and has been determined is that Nugent was a highly divisive character — and not in any good way, to paraphrase the Nashville Scene — someone always accompanied by maximum ugly controversy.
In a newspaper article after the trial’s conclusion, one read:
Shoppers at The Lakes Mall who had been following the case of rock star Ted Nugent and his lawsuit with the Muskegon Summer Celebration committee weren’t surprised by the outcome. A jury Thursday afternoon returned a quick verdict awarding Nugent … his breach-of-contract suit against the summer festival.
“I love Ted Nugent’s music. I understand Nugent has to be taken in context. Everybody don’t see it that way,” said Mike Elijah, 49, who is African-American and a fan of the festival.
“Most people see things as black and white,” Elijah said.
Elijah said he agreed with Summer Celebration’s decision not to allow Nugent to appear at the festival after allegations he made racial slurs during a live Denver radio show.
“Several teenagers asked for comment about the Nugent case were unable to do so without first receiving a briefing that Nugent was once a rock star,” added the newspaper.
A brief but amusing article on Wall Street parasites hedge fund guys and advice dispensers deals with their brand of US catastrophism — as opposed to the flavor found lower down the ladder in the extreme right middle class.
It’s still all about defending against the ravening hordes, the poor — those with color or tastes not like yours, coming for your pile. Buy precious metals and secure your self-sufficient farm getaway deep in the countryside. Be ready to fire a “boom stick” at interlopers.
“While there is no lack of survivalists stockpiling cat food and rifles, some of the direst thinkers are now working on Wall Street, where a combination of fear and foresight has many of the country’s money men contemplating their escape routes,” writes a columnist at AOL’s Daily Finance.
Wall Street catastrophists, of course, don’t see themselves as the villains in this play. It’s a view which puts them on the opposite side of the coin of the middle class white catastrophists, who generally view Wall Street with the same fear and loathing saved for Democrats and anyone of color.
There is an industry to cater to both classes of catastrophist. For the white paupers, there are the advertisements on Fox News — seemingly one every fifteen minutes — for the buying of gold with Gordon Liddy as patron saint. For more plans and tips, there are websites galore selling relatively cheap advice and the usual survivalism samizdat literature which has embroidered the fringes of American society for decades.
For Wall Street, the advice is more costly but about the same in terms of practical value. The column tells us drily:
Post Peak Living and Transition United States have both used dark visions to build a compelling business model that can convince the gullible and frightened to fork over cash for useless advice.
And the best quote, by far: “A fan of dark humor, [one doom predicter] previously advised spending stimulus cash on ‘prostitutes and beer, as these are the only products still produced in the U.S.'”
The US government is set to axe a bit of funding for biodefense, collateral damage as part of a pay-go manuever for preserving $10 billion dollars worth of teaching jobs.
On its face, it’s just another Washington dispute about money. But a move by House Democrats to strip $2 billion from reserve funds for bioterrorism and pandemic flu — without objection from President Obama — has infuriated some of the country’s foremost bioterrorism experts.
It’s a symbol, they say, of how the Obama White House is failing to properly address the threat posed by a potential biological attack, which they say could kill 400,000 Americans and do $2 trillion in economic damage.
The apocalyptic assessment is courtesy of the Graham-Talent comedy team, the mouthpiece group of a loud but small wing of the biodefense industry. Mainstream journalists who cover the issue infrequently still call it by its old august name — the WMD Commission — but the Obama administration cut its funding earlier this year.
Graham-Talent’s only tactic was to regularly attack the administration over its lack of preparedness in regards to bioterrorism and the national insufficiency in quick and expanded transfer of taxpayer dollars to the small industry for which it acts as a spokesmodel.
The Times continues to explain Bob Graham’s view on the bad and wrong horror of choosing to pay for teaching jobs over lubricating the bioterror defense industry:
The proposed cut is “an extremely negative development in our overall efforts to prepare not only for bioterrorism but for other biological events from nature,” said former Sen. Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat.
Obama named Graham to co-chair panels on the oil spill and the financial crisis. [See “The Bad Penny” here. Graham — now an infamous hack/pass-around whore as Commission “co-chairs” of all trades and crises.]
He also co-chaired the bipartisan Commission for the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction, which in January gave the federal government a grade of “F” for bioterrorism preparation. There have been few improvements since, he said.
If terrorists attacked a city today using anthrax or some other biological agent, “I think there would be tens if not hundreds of thousands of people unnecessarily killed,” Graham said. “We know what to do to reduce the impact of a biological attack, but thus far we have been unwilling to implement those steps.”
Graham said he would lobby the White House to restore the funds.
In other words, just another day’s work for Bob Graham, emitting press releases and petitioning opinion pieces, all peddling the same basic message over and over:
The US will suffer more casualties than it did in WW II from a bioterror attack if you don’t listen to me. The economic consequences will make the current troubles of our own devise look like having your lunch money stolen by the school bully.
Using the logic of Bob Graham, any money spent on boosting the middle class or saving jobs is wasted because it takes away from the more urgent need for bioterror defense.
The Times reporter even drags in Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, an ex-CIA chancer. And DD and Jason gave him some rough justice a few months ago at the Boston Globe here.
J checks in on the topic. Check that title. Oh, cheeky!
If you’ve wondered why the blog devotes more and more time to Ted Nugent, here’s why.
I use him as a very public face of American crazy extremism. And you can judge its mainstreaming by how Nugent’s currency as a pundit rises and drops and where it does so.
Paradoxically, when Ted Nugent actually sold records and was a leading draw in American arenas, such extremism was unacceptable in the mainstream. Uncivil, polarizing, vindictive and irrational, it never really had a place in Nugent’s act. If Nugent actually was the depressingly mean foaming-at-the-mouth nuts guy then that he is now, he kept a tight lid on it. It had no place, even in rock music magazines or, oddly, the embarrassing-for-different-reasons VH1 Behind the Music documentary on him about a decade ago.
How he went from being the young man jumping off the top of his amplifier stack in the video embedded here a few days ago to furiously screwed-up geezer is a story that cries out to be told. What was it that curdled Ted Nugent so thoroughly?
Anyway, the elevation of Nugent-style thinking to the commonplace in politics and public debate is one symptom, among many, of the colossal failure of intellect in this country. That Nugent as a polemicist has any audience at all — and he has a big one — does not bode well for any belief in the country’s ability to deal rationally with present and future challenges.
Media Matters runs a regular ticker on Nugent, too, and a post today notes an eye-popping run-on sentence from the man’s latest column in the WaTimes.
While Nugent’s weekly rubbish is notorious for run-ons capable of reducing copy editors to tears, even by the lax standards at that real estate, this one was simply spectacularly bad:
In the otherwise universally recognized perfection of the American experiment in self-government, where evil monsters like Che Guevara and Mao Zedong are routinely worshipped by the very imbeciles that these historical murderers would have slaughtered unhesitatingly, to a community-organizer-in-chief whose terminal rookie agenda is maniacally to spend our way out of debt and drop charges against clear and present criminal New Black Panther thugs threatening voters in Philadelphia, to black-robed idiots claiming Americans have no right to self-defense, where pimps, whores and welfare brats party hearty with the mindless fantasy that Fedzilla will wipe their butts eternally, ad nauseam – I am compelled to increase my crowbar swinging to new heights every day.
If one were to liken the English language to a great hunting ground for Nugent, you could say that instead of being of mighty skill, Ted was eaten by a bear and shit out in the forest a long time ago.
Ted, as whacko, was also on Alex Jones last week, that show being one of the top two radio venues in the country for awe-inspiringly stupid crank conspiracy theory. (The other being Coast to Coast with George Nori.)
Ted now calls Texas home. However, Nugent’s brand is frequently too extreme for some kinder parts of it. One Houston newspaper writer noted an upcoming appearance in the suburb of Pasadena:
My problem is definitely in Nugent’s delivery, specifically the toxic way in which he forces his audiences to listen to his rants in-between songs.
Delivering a message in the course of verse or lyric is an honest approach to getting listeners to think and react.
Holding ticket holders anxious to hears ’70s guitar anthems “Stranglehold” or “Cat Scratch Fever” captive while Nugent howls, “Obama, he’s a piece of shit. I told him to suck on my machine gun” is cheating the whole creative element a bit …
What Nugent has never understood is that people don’t go to his shows to hear his stump speeches. If we wanted to hear a crazy old man yell political “fire” in a crowded room we could hang out at Walmart or the Greyhound bus terminal downtown for a lot less money.
(The fact that Nugent is out in Pasadena, and not at the more prestigious Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion, make it clear that there are others who have tired of his rap as well.)
Days later, another Houston paper covered Nugent’s performance.
The piece was supremely entertaining, capturing Nugent’s current state as a ranting kook perfectly, along with his small rock audience of bottom-out-of-sighters.
Some excerpts:
We aren’t sure if you can have a painting of yourself running over the President and most of his cabinet as your stage backdrop, but manners didn’t stop Gwar from eating a Dick Cheney effigy on stage for the better of four years in the Bush reign.
———
“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. It’s like when you finally get to see Alice Cooper in the guillotine or Slayer’s blood shower during “Reign In Blood.”
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.
I don’t think he likes the President much. I’m swimming in hate.
——–
At this point the little liberal part of Aftermath’s brain wanted to bolt, but instead we walked to the merch booth and bought a shirt for $35. It’s strange how the more heated and aggressive the show, got the more proud we were to have bought the shirt. Free speech isn’t always clean and peaceful, but Nugent believes this stuff, even if there seems to be a pinch of bandwagoneering going on. He didn’t touch on immigrants last night, which would have just confused his message.
He just covered Soul Man ten minutes after the hate-parade. I love cognitive dissonance like whoa.
It’s interesting how the new right wing uses Martin Luther King Jr. as an icon for its perceived struggle, and Nugent interspersed a few photos of the slain civil-rights leader with footage of himself teaching kids about hunting animals. “I celebrate killing shit!” he exclaimed right after the song and video were over.
The writer wryly described the crowd: “Folks in wifebeaters, older gals sporting sweaty cleavage, younger guys in leather vests and a healthy dose of bikers.”
And while they may like to see him these days, it is a group that does not buy Ted CDs anymore.
The government is out of control! I’m heading to the store
for envelopes and baking powder, lads. Bastards will pay!
DD runs a daily search on “anthrax” at the Google news tube. As do many.
And everyone has noticed that minus hits for the heavy metal band named Anthrax, hits on powder hoaxes have ticked up.
The Idaho Statesman, which is in a state with its own anthrax hoaxer, has noticed, too:
Mailing a white powdery substance to scare people can land you in prison – even if the enclosed substance is non-toxic.
Ask Sandy Kevin Lamont Nanney.
The Boise man, who was accused of sending 32 powder-laden letters to hospitals, businesses and government offices in 2003, pleaded guilty to threatening to use a weapon of mass destruction. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison; his next scheduled parole hearing is in 2012.
Spectacular fail, of which there has been much in the past couple years, also flushes the kook powder mailers from the woodwork, notes an FBI man:
“[After Ivins’ mailings is] when it became a cottage industry to scare people. It wasn’t really a tactic used much before that,” said Chris Allen, an FBI spokesman in Washington, D.C.
In 2002, the FBI responded to 2,500 reports of the use or threatened use of anthrax.
Reports nationwide tapered off significantly after 2002 and have been dropping every month – until the past few months, Allen said.
There were about 500 reports in 2008, Bertram said.
Allen said investigators have found there is a flurry of these cases after “key events,” such as the blackout in the Northeast, the Enron scandal and Hurricane Katrina.
The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico could be another key event, Allen said.
Since government officials are common targets of anthrax hoaxers, the latter which are — by definition — extremists, one wagers if they vote, and are not already in prison, they’re probably predominantly from the party of opposition to everything. Although no definitive polling survey exists.
[DD challenge to readers: Google map anthrax hoaxer points of origin, by state. Red or blue? Secondarily: Active chapter of Tea Party within 50 miles, yes or no.]
In one instance, noted recently, the anthrax hoax was used as a retirement plan. Of sorts.
When Ted announces he’s selling an album on the 4th of July for 76 cents, he gets very little attention.
However, when he writes one of his WaTimes columns and Media Matters notices, he gets more decent publicity. But it’s the kind that stems from feeding his new audience of extremist white bigots in the GOP/Tea Party.
“In Wash. Times op-ed, Ted Nugent uses New Black Panthers case as an excuse for race-baiting,” reads a post from Media Matters here.
It then excerpts from his column, debunking his claims (in a companion piece) on a new bit of manufactured outrage from the right, a ‘scandal’ tooted loudly all afternoon on Fox.
In his column, Nugent also complains he’s been vilified as racist by other media sources. As proof he is not so, Nugent cites another famous African American as an inspiration.
Over the weekend on Hannity, it was MLK. Now it’s Rosa Parks. (Notably, Ted’s inspirations are always dead so they can’t be reached for comment.):
As a proud, dedicated protege of my hero, the czaress of defiance, Rosa Parks, and as someone who has been unjustly labeled a racist by bottom-feeding, race-baiting human scum, I say if you are going to level the ugly charge of racism against someone, be prepared to back it up with facts or shut up.
However, over the weekend, a fan site devoted to heavy metal news, Blabbermouth, posted the Nuge’s appearance on Hannity, the one in which he invoked MLK.
Ted doesn’t amuse the demographic he owned decades ago, good guitar playing notwithstanding.
As posted previously, Ted can’t evade the belief held by many that he’s a bigot. This comes from his record as a pundit for the extreme right in regular columns charged with race politics, material that simply uses the dodge of vaguely anonymized name-calling to vilify the inner city poor, union workers in Michigan, people on welfare, illegal immigrants and others — like the President.
And everyone understands exactly what Ted means. The cracker whacko wing of the GOP — basically, the entire party — loves him for it.
