01.20.12
Howard: Limited vocabulary of insults
Ted Nugent likes to shovel piles of insults into his columns at the WaTimes. I like insults, particularly people who are good at them. One of the true pleasures in life is the flattening clever putdown.
But Ted, while easy with the character assassinations and slurs, has only a limited vocabulary.
Thus, the end result is boring.
From Ted’s latest column, a list the slurs, duplicates and triplicates:
cave-dwelling Afghan opium poppy farmer
bureaucratic buffoonery
brain-dead
inebriated idiot, bureaucratic village idiot, high-ranking government bureaucratic idiot — all in the same paragraph, the last two in the same sentence
bureaucratic idiots at ATF, bureaucratic punks — in the same sentence
bureaucratic punks, terminally brain-dead — in one sentence, next graph
stupid, sinister, evil and criminal
brain-dead
What poor an instrument.
User Hostile said,
January 20, 2012 at 11:30 pm
Nugent was on the latest episode of the Simpsons with Homer playing Glen Beck-like character pushing politics for the hateful. I cringed at first, but as the show progressed, it was clear to me that Ted was being portrayed in the episode exactly as he is in real-life: empty headed and mean-spirited.
This episode was a real letdown after watching the “Holidays of Futures Past” which was absolutely the best episode of the Simpsons I’d ever seen since it started in 1989. Dare I say it: the story was about coming to grips with broken dreams and crushed expectations and accepting it with grace, and making the best of it.
You really shouldn’t waste your time on Ted, DD. All you see is a shell of a man who’s afraid to die because he’s done nothing of significance with his life, except blame others for what he can’t control.
The loss you spoke of in your earlier columns–honestly, I believe he/she gave infinitely more then Ted could ever even conceive of.
But to be fair to Nugent, as far as I can tell, he already died a long time ago.
George Smith said,
January 21, 2012 at 9:01 am
You really shouldn’t waste your time on Ted, DD
Believe me, the thought’s crossed my mind a number of times. It’s sort of like a Media Matters thing as they run a ticker on him, too, but without the jokes.
But I’m still considering slowly winding it down. Originally I thought it could be used to write an unauthorized biography but no one was interested. Presumably because publishers know the people who go to his shows now don’t buy books, those who buy his books can’t read and wouldn’t like such a thing, anyway, and the people leftover smart enough to be curious about such a thing can be counted in the number of cans in a case of beer.