Mitt Romney’s enthusiasm over endorsement weeks ago by Ted Nugent was only more proof that he’ll never be president of the United States. As I wrote earlier this week, it’s just another in a seemingly endless chain of weird gaffes, like getting stoked over a recommendation from flesh-eating bacteria or a deer tick.
Throughout the campaign season, Republicans have been fending off accusations of being more misogynistic than Archie Bunker meets Ralph Kramden. And yet Romney practically went all weak in the knees over Nugent throwing his 16th century support in his general direction.
Even odder, apparently Romney courted Nugent’s endorsement, which has to be a bit like seeking the nod of Pete Rose to get into Cooperstown.
Women are running away in droves from the GOP, yet Romney and his giddy sons thought the squeal of approval from the rocker was way cool.
Ted Nugent has a First Amendment right to stay whatever ditsy stuff he wants, including referring to many elected female Democrats as either b——, criminals, communists or “varmints.” Varmints? In a free country you’re free to be a bore.
For his part, all Romney could muster when he was informed he had just been endorsed by a guy who makes Ike Turner look like Phil Donahue was to issue a call for greater civility. It’s a little late for that, Willard …
Perhaps Romney is of the opinion the critical Nugent blessing will help with that rootin’-tootin’, gun-toting, good ol’ boy crowd. Maybe in Nugent, the uptight, pinched Romney can vicariously live out his inner Bubba yearning to keep women in the kitchen whipping up roadkill …
As for Deliverance’s answer to Cole Porter, for all the faux bravado and delusions of persecution, don’t you suspect when the Secret Service badges showed up, Ted Nugent turned into a whimpering, apologetic … well, let’s go with varmint?
From the Washington Times, Ted explains how he was being a true patriot and it’s all those Mao ZeDongs, Che Guevaras and Saul Alinsky’s, the enemies within, who are responsible:
By no stretch of the imagination did I ever threaten anyone’s life, or hint of violence or mayhem. Metaphors needn’t be explained to educated people.
I passionately rallied the American civilian troops to stand up for what is right and demand that the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights be once again the measure of all laws and policies in America.
Then in their ever-desperate scramble to divert attention from the crimes of their communist leaders, the Saul Alinsky “Rules for Radicals” left-wing media and terminally liberal Democrats circled their battlewagons of deceit and hate and unleashed their tsunami of lies about me and everything I said.
To me, my family and thinking America, the dysfunctional left-wing hate hysteria was laughable. I became the No. 1 global tweet entity, while every newspaper and America-hating television and radio gang literally tripped over themselves in a feeble attempt to out-lie each other.
I personally have never been prouder …
Tell it to the Secret Service. And we’ve noticed you’ve left out the metaphor about shooting the coyote urinating on the couch.
“Those who despise me blindly chant Mao Zedong and Che Guevara rants, and the difference between our good and their bad is glaring,” Nugent finishes. “Choose your side carefully, America. The shining city on the hill is under attack from within.”
Yep, we all know the writings of Mao Zedong and Che Guevara by heart. It’s a conspiracy. You saw through it, too. We, the Americommies — guilty as charged.
And he did. Off the hook. On the other hand, perhaps not feeling real good about the sentiments exposed in its controversial video of the Nugent interview, the NRA removed it from YouTube today.)
Rocker Ted Nugent has been summoned to meet with Secret Service officials after making threatening statements aimed at President Barack Obama at a National Rifle Association convention in Missouri over the weekend.
The staunch conservative, who endorsed Obama’s leading rival, Mitt Romney, for the presidency last month, will meet with agents on Thursday to discuss what he said …
Confirming the news that he’ll be speaking to Secret Service agents during a radio interview with broadcaster Glenn Beck on Wednesday morning, Nugent said, “We actually have heard from the Secret Service and they have a duty. I support them. I salute them. And I look forward to our meeting tomorrow. We’re going to have a little barbecue get-together.
“I’m not trying to diminish the seriousness of this, because if the Secret Service are doing it, they are serious. They are dedicated and I will be as polite and supportive as I possibly can be, which will be thoroughly.”
The Secret Service won’t be having barbecue with Ted Nugent, no matter how he dresses it up. He won’t be laughing it off.
Perhaps nothing will come of it. (Eventually, so it was. Ted Nugent off the hook, from the LA Times. On the other hand, the NRA — perhaps not feeling so strongly about the great sentiment expressed in the interview, removed it from YouTube the same day as the Secret Service interview. )
But the Secret Service is not chatting with Ted because they wanna be his pals and pin a medal on him for being a swell free speech-exercising American. They will be trying to make a determination on whether he was threatening the president or contributing to the creation of a threat environment.
Ted is being probed for a potential crime and while it may make him popular with other right wing radicals it’s not something for you resume.
Average Americans get a big case of worry and anxiety if they’ve done something that has triggered the Secret Service to come calling.
The mainstream news has done kind of an iffy job on the story, reporting only Ted’s most attention getting lines from the NRA show.
But I’ll bet you the Secret Service has looked at the video carefully, beginning to end. And they’re going to ask Ted what he meant, right at the conclusion, when he told the crowd: “Keep your eyes peeled, I may need you soon.”
I bet the Secret Service will ask something like, “What exactly did you mean, Mr. Nugent, and what are you planning to need these men for?
It would be interesting to hear this interview. Is Ted going to have his lawyer present? He might think about it. Given the context of his appearance and calling for war against criminals said to be infesting the government. At a big gun show. In a country which has a history of presidents and politicians getting shot.
I’d bet the Secret Service is also interested in plumbing how much may constitute rhetorical incitement of an audience to commit violence against the president. And the intent.
I’ve emphasized before that Ted’s speech is functionally indistinguishable from the words of the right wing extremists, put into FBI affidavits when they’re banged up — at the rate of a couple times a year — for domestic terror plots.
These people don’t view themselves as terrorists. Like Ted, they invariably speak of themselves as patriots. They are defending the Constitution against violations, coming to the decision that a violent solution is necessary to correct the wrongs. They exhort each other in this.
And that’s just what Ted Nugent has been doing for the last few years. He’s a panderer and this part of his career, which has nothing to do with his music or rock and roll legacy, is all about goading an audience of right wing extremists, all armed. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He knows what they want. He regularly plays to their worst instincts.
They want to hear Ted walk up to the line and call for violence against the opposition while he hides behind linguistic tricks that don’t work for those who do the same thing everyday, but who aren’t public figures, some of whom become targets of FBI investigations for it.
And here it has backfired on him. If you have read this blog, it’s not like Ted acted differently at the gun show than he normally does. Finally, perhaps out of coincidence and the luck of the draw, some started looking at his words a little more intently.
Watch that video. I know it’s tough to bear. It’s horrid, twenty pounds of excrement in a ten pound bag.
But you tell me if the crowd is really up for Ted Nugent while he goes on in his way. Why is the NRA host looking just a tad uncomfortable, adding “What a silent crowd.”
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 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.
“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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
I’ve slowed the pace of posting on Howard, not because he’s not around but because it’s all the same now. Ted Nugent is nuts and repellent but repetitive. His shtick is a shallow one and for a man enamored of using insults as weapons he has very little in the armory. All his enemies are are either subhuman, punks or hippies — sometimes all three at the same time.
He was a guest at the NRA Convention in St. Louis this weekend. I’ve embedded a video of him being interviewed. While the hall is filled with gun owners walking by, the response to Ted is tepid.
Ted bores young people who don’t know him. And for people not out on the most extreme edge with those musing daily about going to Washington to shoot people, Ted is just too unpalatable. However, there’s always value in showing readers overseas just how throwback and extreme some of us are in the declining superpower.
Here, in the big convention for gun promotion, even the NRA’s host is taken a little aback by Ted’s fountain of virulent angry crazy. He notices it’s killing most of the interest, at one point remarking: “What a silent crowd.”
But I listened to the entire thing so you don’t have to.
Here are Ted’s high moments. He’s always at his “best” when coming off like some paranoid old white guy from the country in the Sixties, the air whistling between his teeth while he rants about fluoride in the water as government tyranny:
If Barack Obama becomes the President in November again I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year. [A couple of nervous laughs from the crowd. Is Ted joking? They can't tell.] Why are you laughing? You think that’s funny!? That’s not funny at all! I’m serious as a heart attack!
If you can’t galvanize … people to vote for Mitt Romney, we’re done. We’ll be a suburb of Indonesia next year. Our president, attorney journal, our vice president, Hillary Clinton — they’re criminals.
This is a Ted riff on the current administration, now couched as a fable on what should be done about the “coyote” …
If the coyote’s in your living room pissing on your couch, it’s not the coyote’s fault, it’s your fault for not shooting him.
“I know Mitt Romney has made terrible mistakes in the past up there in the Massachusetts zone…”
[Mitt Romney] vowed to me … he will help gut Fedzilla… if you haven’t got a job, how can there be unemployment benefits … We’ve got a bloodsucker nation, this President is buying their votes, Mitt Romney is going to attack all these violations…
At one point Ted launches into a personal tale about his “three-legged oryx” — a non-native antelope on his ranch in Texas — and not being able to mercy kill it, allegedly because of government regulation.
He rants, likening this, somehow, to Nazi Germany when “the Jews” were being herded onto trains by the SS. It’s an offensive comparison and Ted is oblivious to everything but his personal animus. He tells the crowd it’s time to take the gun off the “brown shirt” and shoot it up his ass. The crowd is quiet. Even the gun-owners are nervous about cheering him too much on it.
Here is an interesting interview with Tom Werman. He produced many straight hard rock acts who turned into big sellers and arena draws, mostly by dint of singles which charted off the projects he did with them.
Werman says he fell into the work, never having a career plan. He also tells the interviewer he saw himself as a pop guy, making records he liked to hear. The industry, because he worked with Ted Nugent, saw him as a hard rock producer.
This served those he worked with well. When Werman stopped producing Ted Nugent, Howard stopped getting on the radio.
Indeed, the only stuff from Howard’s back catalog that gets played today is the material produced by Tom Werman.
Werman also did the big sellers for Cheap Trick, Twisted Sister, Poison and Molly Hatchet.
“A mostly black rock ‘n’ roll band with two white guys – people didn’t know what to think of them. They were tight, rocked hard, and man, did they love Led Zeppelin, which is what they sounded like – a very funky version of Zeppelin.
“I tried to bring a commercial sensibility to them, a pop side to go with their funk and hard rock. But the record stiffed. Radio just didn’t take to it. The official line I was given from the label was, ‘It slipped through the cracks,” which meant it was too white for black radio and too black for white radio.
“Even so, I think they were ahead of their time. I’m very proud of this album.”
One of the tracks produced by Werman, surely a hoot to do, was “Mickey’s Monkey,” a conversion of the Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ hit into Led Zeppelin’s “Custard Pie.” It’s here.
Funny as hell with the rip of LZ, it shoulda been huge.
[When] you look at the numbers, it’s stunning how little this Republican primary electorate resembles the rest of the United States … They are much closer to the population of 1890 than of 2012.
From the New York Times, the piece continues: “[The nomination is] occurring in a different place, guided by talk-radio extremists and religious zealots, with only a vague resemblance to the states where it has taken place.”
This comes as no surprise. It’s easy to see the extremists are good at being horrible, particularly when financed by idiot billionaires who wonder why their old patriarchal jokes about women putting aspirin between their knees from Fifties aren’t funny anymore.
When I worked at the Morning Call newspaper in the late Eighties, editors wouldn’t allow such quotes into the newspaper, even if they were made by important townsmen at local meetings. People were gently saved from themselves.
Now this doesn’t happen. Perversely, there’s a big audience that loves hearing extremely angry white bigots be themselves.
It’s here in southern California in the guise of Los Angeles radio celebrities John and Ken.
Since they’re the biggest thing in radio in the Southland it remains to be seen whether it sticks. It probably won’t for it’s not like the radio men don’t do such things regularly.
John and Ken have a huge audience precisely because they cater to the other California, not the place I live.
California, as anyone with any sense will tell you, is two states.
The one that matters, with the majority and a polyglot, diverse population, is found in the coastal cities and towns.
And there is the second California, mostly really angry white guys and their families, living in the interior. That audience likes to hear radio that blames all problems on people of other colors — the Asians, the Latinos, the “crack ho’s,” the homos, the liberals — and suggests we’d all be better off if they were either all in prison or given sound beatings.
That’s the audience of John and Ken.
The Los Angeles Times recently ran a profile of the two, one suggesting they are more nuanced than your average bigots.
I know Times people, have met many over the years, and saw them again at the memorial for my friend, Don. They don’t listen to John & Ken and they all knew the stuff their paper printed on them, in trying to appear fair and balanced, to coin a phrase, was nonsense.
Broadcasting from a Democratic stronghold in a politically deep blue state, Kobylt and Chiampou have created one of the most popular local radio talk shows in the country by tapping into the contradiction that is California. Not a single Republican holds a statewide elected office. The Legislature is solidly Democratic … The angrier the Californians, the likelier they are to listen in.
For much of their tenure in Southern California, the New Jersey radio transplants have hammered away at illegal immigration. They spent weeks calling on Brown to veto the second half of the California Dream Act, which gives taxpayer-supported college grants to illegal immigrants …
They also gave out the cellphone number for Jorge-Mario Cabrera, spokesman for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, and urged listeners to give him a piece of their minds. More than 500 did, Cabrera said.
Transcripts of about 40 calls provided by Cabrera are filled with profanity. One man who called 42 times, Cabrera said, offered this sentiment: “You pig. I hope you die in your own vomit.”
The John & Ken audience is the same as the one ruling the GOP race.
Politically, John & Ken and their loyal fans have no power in California outside the ability to be spiteful and harassing. And if it weren’t for the newspaper, other media pieces and the occasional billboard, the majority of Californians wouldn’t know anything about them.
However, as in the small white idiot GOP caucuses in the heartland, as with the John & Ken fanbase, the loyalists are extremely focused. And this has been their time to show the rest of us what odious folks they truly are.
Over a year ago I started a tab on Ted Nugent, primarily to show how his special brand of stupid foaming-at-the-mouth incivility had traveled into the mainstream.
But today miscellaneous Ted Nugents, some far more well-dressed, are in the news daily.
Ted-style quote, still excessive and alienating as ever, has become the stuff through which the GOP rallies its own.
“We have a guy in the White House who is an absolute, America-hating punk,” Nugent said. “And it isn’t really the punk’s fault. It’s we the people for bending over and letting the punk in the door.”
“How about a welfare program … (where) for every kid who gets a sandwich from the welfare program, there’s about 10,000 pigs buying bling-bling, dope and meth with my welfare money,”
“If we don’t fix the United States government this November, we will get exactly what we asked for,” Nugent said, “and it won’t be the rabid coyote’s fault for getting into our living room – it will be our fault for not shooting him.”
“Prior to being elected President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln represented Sangamon County in the Illinois Legislature,” reads a Wikipedia entry on it.
Lincoln, as everyone knows, was fatally shot by John Wilkes Booth.
An amusing editorial cartoon of Ted Nugent standing before a portrait of Lincoln, from the Springfield, IL, newspaper is here. Click on it for a large version.
By the time you read this, Mitt Romney may have released his tax returns. Let’s hope not.
The real reason Mr. Romney is being pressured to release his tax returns is because his fellow GOP presidential candidates, his hateful critics and crazy Demoncrats live to wage class warfare against him for being successful. This is so very wrong.
There is this toxic, anti-American idea that has surfaced that financial success is something that should be questioned, maligned and condemned and is somehow malicious. This is dangerous and dumb.
Nugent has been wrong every time he’s commented on GOP presidential contenders. Around a year ago he found Donald Trump intriguing. Months later he endorsed Rick Perry. These sallies went well.
If I were a betting man I’d almost tempted to take the position that you’ve no chance to be President when Ted Nugent attempts to ride to the rescue because a rival is winning by painting you as a corporate vulture.
If you’re a later-comer and don’t understand my references to Ted as “Howard,” it’s from the a character in The Treasure of Sierra Madre.
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.
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
