04.17.12
Lay down with the dog, you might get fleas
Good news, lads! Good news! Of course this isn’t a current photo of Howard. Nugent’s new look scares children.
It took about 24 hours for the fountain of angry crazy Ted delivered at the the NRA convention in St. Louis to flow outward and soak the news agencies. Here at DD blog, I figure it’s because most of the journalists at the dailies were way too lazy and above-it-all to consider immediately listening to the horrid 25 minute interview I embedded yesterday.
Been there, done that, they all think. Yeah, Ted, he once threatened Obama onstage and added Hillary should suck on his machine gun. Boring.
Ted’s been that way for a long time. And he counts on being ignored by the people who could do him the most harm, those who write news articles which could land, via the wires, in the small dailies of the dump towns he’s getting ready to tour this summer.
If what Ted said, in its entirety, were printed in the papers, he’d lose some business.
And that’s because Ted’s mindset and jabber are almost exactly like that of the old coots in the Georgia Ricin Beans Gang, destined to be banged up for years as domestic terrorists.
The similarities: Ted and the Georgia Ricin Beans Gang ranted about violation of the Constitution. And they talk about using violent solutions to rescue the country. So does Ted only he uses tricky language to disguise it.
The main difference between Ted and the cranks in the Georgia Ricin Beans Gang: Ted’s famous, they’re not. And Ted doesn’t have an FBI informant hanging around him undercover, seeing if he can be egged into getting into something he shouldn’t.
But the Ted’s words at the NRA have gone viral.
“If you can’t galvanize and promote and recruit people to vote for Mitt Romney, we’re done,” Nugent said. “We’ll be a suburb of Indonesia next year. Our president, attorney general, our vice president, Hillary Clinton — they’re criminals, they’re criminals.”
New York magazine’s Daily Intel blog reports that a Secret Service spokesman told them, “We are aware of it and we’ll conduct an appropriate follow up” regarding Nugent’s comments.
Nugent also ripped into four of the Supreme Court justices for what he says is their stance against Americans’ “right to keep and bear arms.” He concluded with a call to cut off the heads of Democrats in November: “We need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November. Any questions?”
Of course, there’s still no mention of Ted’s nut rant about the government preventing him from mercy killing his “three-legged oryx” and how that was like Nazi Germany putting the Jews onto trains. And that it was time for us to take the gun off “the brown shirt” and shoot it up his ass.
No mention of his new coyote shtick, either, one in which he uses a pretty lame linguistic stunt to tell his audience that if they don’t shoot “the coyote for pissing on their couch” — meaning the president or Democrats, in general — they will have only themselves to blame. At the annual meeting of the National Rifle Association.
And … near the end of his talk there’s a conspiratorial moment when Ted tells his audience he might have need of them some day and that they should be ready. When Ted thinks he’s not being watched closely he has a history of throwing red meat to crazy people, meaning he goes right to the edge, insinuating or directly telling listeners they ought to be ready for armed revolt.
Words have consequences, particularly here where there’s a good history of presidents and politicians being shot by the unhinged.
Most sensible people with critical facilities have a good idea what Nugent is playing with. His is the language of the white extreme right-wing armed radical, the kind — a few of which, the FBI and ATF jail every year. To emphasize again: The main difference is Ted’s famous as an inflammatory celebrity entertainer and in that role he views himself as a leader for crystallizing thought and inspiration.
Yesterday’s post on Nugent and the embed is here.
Skim through it again, if you will. You tell me if the NRA host looks real pleased with the direction it took.
Many in the hall are filing by, ignoring Nugent.
At one point, the host puts a little girl on stage next to the Nuge to ask him who’s his favorite president. Nugent is so nuts he can’t even act appropriately around a very small, very young child. Instead of giving a straight answer, he says “Charlton Heston.”
The child obviously has no idea who Ted Nugent means. Nugent laughs. It’s another awkward moment and he’s blown it royally. He couldn’t even be nice and humor a little girl. If you have the patience to search for it and have a decent bone in your body, you’ll cringe.
If enough people saw these vignettes even the majority of the hardcore right fools would want to have nothing to do with Ted Nugent. There is something profoundly wrong with him and it is only a symptom of the dark times in which we live that he wields it as a career asset.
Nevertheless, most of Ted’s audience at the NRA interview — which isn’t big — did not give him any serious huzzahs. They saw inappropriate behavior too unhooked even for them.
A couple weeks ago Nugent endorsed Mitt Romney. Romney, who is totally without principles, a person who will seemingly do anything convenient to be President, made a noise about talking to Ted and accepting that endorsement.
Today, from the wires, Romney had a spokesperson do his usual thing:
Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign called for civility on Tuesday after aging rock star Ted Nugent made an apparent threat against President Barack Obama before an audience of U.S. gun lobbyists …
Andrea Saul, Romney’s spokeswoman, did not condemn Nugent in an email on Tuesday but said Romney wants to promote civility.
“Divisive language is offensive no matter what side of the political aisle it comes from. Mitt Romney believes everyone needs to be civil,” she said.
For many many reasons, this being yet another, Mitt Romney will never be president of the United States. Mitt Romney, the epitome of the 1 percenter, and Ted Nugent, the Motor City Madman now more well known as a true blue reactionary Texas wacko — it’s to laugh. It was just another clueless Romney gaffe, similar to accepting an endorsement from something like flesh-eating bacteria or a deer tick.
It was never going to be an asset. And his staff must be incompetent if they didn’t tell him.
Nugent — from the archives.