01.14.11
Same old Nugent
UPDATED
I’ve said that when Ted Nugent doesn’t use incivility and the threat of violence in his columns at the WaTimes he has nothing to say. Without these things he’s an empty fellow.
Which made his last column appear as sent in by a sleepwalker. Or mostly ghost-written by a frantic editor.
Nugent knows this. And he’s particularly threatened by any national admonitions to tone it down. After all, calling people names got him tossed off the pages of his old home, the Waco Tribune — a right-wing newspaper.
There, Nugent was told to tone it down. At first he agreed. Then he flipped out. So he was sent packing.
This week’s national appeals to curb the “violent rhetoric” strikes right at Nugent’s only talent outside guitar playing and — well, hunting.
I say conservatives should turn up the rhetoric. When honestly identified, the hues and cries from the right are good for America, calls to get America back on track. Only those opposed to such an upgrade would find fault with such rhetoric.
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If liberals truly wanted to tone down the rhetoric, they could prove it by stopping the lying. But that won’t happen. Mr. Krugman and other liberals know that if it weren’t for a steady drumbeat of lies and deceit, the Democratic Party would cease to exist.
Let’s be honest. Those on the left don’t want to tone down political rhetoric. They only want to tone down conservative speech to make it more “fair.”
The Democrats are wrong on everything from energy to health care to taxes. What they despise is having their agenda exposed, dissected and ridiculed.
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And the conclusion:
In order to defeat liberals on the political-ideology battlefield, conservatives must be clear in purpose and then get after it by targeting (yes, I said targeting) and attacking Democratic nostrums that have weakened America. Expose, isolate and eliminate liberals and their fuzzy-headed policies …
Conservatives have liberals outnumbered and surrounded. Don’t play nice with liberal snakes. Don’t let them escape. Instead, do America a favor and crush liberalism.
Nugent is particularly irked by Paul Krugman, whose twice weekly column and blog must really push his buttons.
The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.
There’s no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care. The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose.
This deep divide in American political morality — for that’s what it amounts to — is a relatively recent development …
As many analysts have noted, the Obama health reform — whose passage was met with vandalism and death threats against members of Congress — was modeled on Republican plans from the 1990s.
But that was then. Today’s G.O.P. sees much of what the modern federal government does as illegitimate; today’s Democratic Party does not … Right now, each side in that debate passionately believes that the other side is wrong. And it’s all right for them to say that. What’s not acceptable is the kind of violence and eliminationist rhetoric encouraging violence that has become all too common these past two years.
Just for good measure, Nugent — again — from early last year at the WaTimes:
November is hunting season. No bag limit.
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. I am the steel ballerina. Let’s dance.
It is not good enough simply to spotlight cockroaches: Ultimately, all caring people must always rally to the requisite stomping party. For us varmint hunters, these are truly the good old days of a target-rich environment with no bag limit. Let the stomping increase to a furious frenzy and cacophony of good over evil. May America create the splat heard round the world. My steel-toed boots are giddy with anticipatory delight. Stomp on into a voting booth near you.
Et cetera, from still another:
If a business was run the way our bandit politicians have run our government, the owners of the business would be charged with any number of crimes. The same rules do not apply to the political punks who run our country and genuflect at the altar of inefficiency and graft. We need look no further than the robbing of the Social Security Trust Fund to know that dishonesty is the way of life in DC. I’m surprised Barney Frank hasn’t proposed a tribute for Bernie Madoff.
Notice how the left-wing bureaucrat punks in DC support throwing more good money after bad as the solution to our nation’s health care “crisis”? That’s standard operating procedure for left-wing numbnuts who believe Fedzilla is the answer to every problem in America.
These political robber barons will seemingly support anything that keeps feeding the bloated Fedzilla with our hard-earned tax dollars regardless that our dollars are outrageously wasted and that there is little to no accountability how our dollars are spent. The largest crisis America faces is not health care, the war on terror, or Nancy Pelosi’s crazy rants, but rather the lying, cheating punk politicians in DC who trample on our constitution …
Update addendum:
More of Nugent’s 2010 rant on not enough gun carrying US citizens is worth reprinting. This, coming at a time when there is obviously no gun control in the US. Politically, it has been a third rail, thank to the power of the NRA. And it is only the Loughner massacre in Tucson that makes it now possible to see minor current legislation to curb extended magazines moving forward.
Nugent:
Since the 1960s LSD-inspired goofiness of peace and love, I have always been convinced that the gun-control issue has been the tip of the culture-war spear. Why the peaceniks still deny the truth that more guns equal less crime, in spite of the tsunami of global evidence from every imaginable source, is one of mankind’s greatest mysteries …
More phenomenally stupid is the whole world’s denial of the plethora of statistics proven in John Lott’s book “More Guns, Less Crime,” in which the desirable condition of safer streets and communities with drastically reduced violent crime is accomplished most readily where more citizens not only have access to firearms but actually carry them daily on their persons.
From the ultrasafe streets of Switzerland, where every household has a real, honest-to-God full-auto-assault rifle and ammo on hand (and a proud national respect for their fellow citizens, mind you) to the multitude of jurisdictions across America where more concealed weapons per capita are issued, violent crime not only plummets, but personal-assault crimes such as rape, carjacking and armed robbery actually disappear in many instances.
At this point, everyone knows that one of the heroes at the Tucson massacre was carrying. It didn’t help and it might have ended in even more blood had he used it.
And Nugent is not quite right about Switzerland, in a self-serving way. The reality is more complicated.
From Der Spiegel, three years ago:
It comes as a surprise to many to learn that the peaceful country has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world — lagging [only] behind the United States …
Able-bodied men have to serve in the military and are issued with assault rifles or pistols. They are allowed to keep their weapons and 50 rounds of ammunition at home during military service — which generally goes to the age of 30 or even longer — so that the army can be mobilized at short notice. Many men buy their weapons after they finish their military service, and the arms are often stored in unsecured closets, attics or cellars.
The new public mood is largely in response to a series of shootings involving army weapons. In a 2001 incident which sparked nationwide debate, 15 people died when a man opened fire with an army assault rifle in a regional parliament building in the small town of Zug, shooting 14 people and killing himself.
Around 300 people are killed in Switzerland each year in incidents — mostly suicides and family murders — involving army guns. According to a 25-country survey by the British-based non-governmental organization International Action Network on Small Arms, Switzerland’s total number of gun deaths, including accidents, in 2005 was 6.2 per 100,000 people — second only to the US rate of 9.42 per 100,000.
Gun advocacy in the US has rendered it impossible to research gun control law and statistics on the web. As anyone who tries to do it quickly finds out.
The US gun lobby has not only defeated all politicians but, in this matter, has also bested Google and all Internet search.
Note: The New York Times appears to be starting the move to put an unknown part of its content behind a wall. Readers may notice this if they access Paul Krugman’s opinion piece more than once from the same browser. At which point they are faced with a login prompt.
There is a (perhaps) temporary way around this.
It’s tied to your nytimes.com cookie for now. So if you run your browser in a program like Sandboxie, as DD does, you can simply exit when faced with the prompt and delete all contents in the virtual sandbox. That will destroy the cookie and, as far as the New York Times website is concerned, you’ll look like a new reader the next time you access the material.
Probably won’t work forever, though. And if that bit of information was too much to follow, never mind.