Support American jobs and businesses. Buy a Gibson guitar and throttle some good old American R&B love songs of defiance.
Nugent plays Gibsons and the entire column is a rant about the government investigation into Gibson’s illegal importing of ebony, something every other guitar company manages to avoid getting into trouble over. (For the record, the government recently signed an agreement with Gibson letting the company off the hook on the condition that in the statement of fact it essentially admitted it had violated the law. It was a decent deal.)
Gibson employs more people in China, Korea and Indonesia than it does in the US. It’s US manufacturing is for the high end of the market. All American guitar manufacturers abandoned US production for the low and middle markets, the meat of the business, over a decade ago. All of it was sent to China.
The pricing of its domestically made product, and the company’s move into China exploded the demand and market for counterfeit Gibson guitars. Documented on YouTube, many American buyers show little brand loyalty to the firm, even wanting to buy counterfeits, because of the current state of guitar manufacturing.
For months they have watched their plant being dismantled and shipped to China, piece by piece, as they show teams of Chinese workers how to do the jobs they have dedicated their lives to.
“It’s not easy to get up in the morning, training them to do your job so that you can be made unemployed,” said Borman, pictured, a mother of three who has worked for 23 years at the Sensata auto sensors plant …
Borman knows her eventual fate in the stricken economy that surrounds Freeport. “I am going to be competing for minimum wage jobs with my own daughter,” she said.
Such scenes have been common in America as manufacturing has fled abroad in search of cheaper wages.
But, in the midst of the 2012 presidential election, Freeport is different. For Sensata is majority-owned by Bain Capital, the private equity firm once led by Mitt Romney, that has become a hugely controversial symbol of how the modern globalised American economy works.
The middle class blames Congress as the lead culprit for its demise, but blames itself least of all. While 62% of middle class respondents to the Pew survey blamed Congress for their worsening state, 54% blamed banks and financial institutions, 47% blamed corporations, 44% blamed the Bush administration, 39% blamed foreign competition and 34% blamed the Obama administration. Just 8% of all respondents blamed the man (or the woman) in the mirror.
An inexact metaphor for the middle class’s election choices during the last few decades — good at self-destructive dick biting.
Todd Akin may be a famous horrid man but that’s the manner of person a constituency of Americans admire. They cleave together, they have their media (the Internet, instead of making stone ignorance harder to defend has created self-isolating immune to outsider dilution social Balkanization, virtual barbwire next to barbwire) and they admire the detestable. When the detestables do or say something horrendous in public they draw strength from any subsequent condemnation. It is their validation.
It’s why Ted Nugent does all right.
Nugent’s audience appreciates that he’s terrible Ted. And it matters very little what others say and write about him, this blog included. I can make lists of the quotations from the psychopath and readers can laugh or cringe but the pyschopaths are affected not one whit. It has no more impact than American celebrities and social media getting publicly angry with the Russian government for jailing the women of Pussy Riot.
We live in a country that is permanently divided. And the cracks go deep into US history; this is not new.
I’ve often thought the current Republican Party has been trying to refight and win the Civil War for decades. I’m not alone in this.
At Esquire, Charles Pierce puts it this way, in two different posts, here and here:
[Akin’s] more than halfway to becoming a symbol that the opposition can use to raise money and anger. However, as far as his withdrawal is concerned, we’re at a point in which Missouri Republicans — the folks who never have had a problem putting this guy in Congress and obviously had no problem with him as a senator — have to choose between common decency and political tribalism. I’m not betting anything I value in either direction on that one.
I think we are looking at an 1850’s of the political mind. I think we are two countries, each with its own history, and laws, and language, and religion, and their own mass media to amplify all those things. But only one of these two countries of the mind is tightly organized and capable of moving as a single unit. I think things like the sovereign-citizens movement are merely a particularly vivid example of this …
In the 1850’s, two countries of the mind existed long before the United States actually was divided into two separate nations. They had no common history, not even a common language with which to discuss the differences between them. Resolution was impossible in a country in which even the word “freedom” didn’t mean the same thing. Each had their own history, and laws, and language, and religion, and even a rudimentary mass media through which to amplify all of these. Those circumstances exist again today, far deeper divisions than simple “polarization” or even “tribalism.” There are two countries of the mind. One of them, the conservative one, is the far better organized whole. It is round. It is complete. It has a wild frontier, which is also more round and whole and organized.
The second excerpt from Pierce’s blog is a brief discussion of the shooting of Louisiana police officers who wandered into a sovereign citizen trailer encampment last week.
The point he makes is that today our domestic terror groups aren’t from the extreme end of the Democratic Party, they share a border with the far right, one that stretches back into American history. And that demographic, one I call the Psychopath Vote, owns an entire party, finding itself fought by an often feckless and uninspired opposition.
So it can always win.
“It strikes me that this is a tempest in a teapot,” said one Missouri voter, a Republican to CNN for a story today. “I think he used a word that in reflection he wouldn’t use again, like the word ‘legitimate.’ Forcible. But this is just a matter of semantics … I think people are looking for something to accuse Todd or drag him down when he, I don’t think he said anything that’s really worth all the coverage that it’s getting.”
It is not like the Senate has never had much of a shortage of people like Akin — science deniers, home schoolers, American theocrats.
There’s James Inhofe, Tom Coburn, Jim DeMint … the guy Claire McCaskill defeated years ago, Jim Talent, often ridiculed here.
Here’s the current list of washed-up angry white guy musicians who really really hate the president:
Hank Williams, Jr. — He compared the president to Hitler on Fox and had his music canned on Monday night football. This inspired his new album of mostly hating on Obama tunes. He gave the record away on YouTube which didn’t make it any less the dud.
Onstage in Iowa, over the weekend, a quote: “We’ve got a Muslim president who hates farming, hates the military, hates the U.S. and we hate him!”
A few days earlier washed up white thrash metal guitarist Dave Mustaine of Megadeth tells an audience in Singapore the president was behind recent mass shootings. When this is publicized Mustaine continues the nutso and white-knuckle ex-drunk act on Alex Jones, roping this all into some UN conspiracy to deprive Americans of guns as well as anything else you can think of. Mustaine’s words, he insists, have been taken out of context by the mainstream media.
And — of course, there is Ted Nugent. Nugent spouts the same weird John Bircher/Tea Party conspiracy crap about UN plotting, too.
No one will pay for Ted Nugent to make records anymore so pretty much all he has left is touring county fairs and casinos during the summer, running celebrity hunts for his cable television show and appearing as an extremist pundit for the right. This year he’s been by the US Secret Service for popping off at the NRA convention. And he has racked up a reputation as a hunting scofflaw after two convictions, one for deer baiting, the other for illegally bagging a bear.
“Williams isn’t the only musician to speak out about politics in colorful ways this month.”
Comparing the President to Hitler, implying he was behind recent massacres, saying if the president is re-elected you’ll be dead, a statement that gets the Secret Service to your door — these are all examples of speaking out about politics in “colorful ways.”
“The president, for the record, is a Christian,” the Hollywood Reporter person adds helpfully.
Only an ignorant, uneducated society will fall for scams such as California banning mountain-lion hunting and turning a thriving black bear population from an asset into an instant liability by banning the use of hounds. Watch the media for reports of increased out-of-control bear-nuisance hysteria now that bait and hounds are no longer allowed to adequately harvest the annual surplus of California’s amazing bear population. More and more mountains of wasted tax dollars will be spent further compensating more ranchers and landowners for destroyed livestock, multiple relocations and ultimately the killing of bears and burying of these precious resources by government-hired killers for guaranteed lose-lose insanity …
The lunatic fringe is winning in California, and that should be a wake-up call to all concerned conservationists that when allowed, logic will be tossed to the wind and conservation will go out the window with it.
And with two convictions on hunting infractions in the last three years, he now has a reputation as something of a hunting scofflaw.
As for southern California and wildlife, we have a lot of it. Pasadena has raccoons, skunks, opossums, coyotes and the infrequent bear strolling into neighborhoods for trash and pool swimming in the housing developments up against the mountain.
There is no evidence of hysteria in the locals. In fact, pretty much everyone likes such stories.
However, you shan’t want to miss this bit of smart phone video from Nugent at the House of Blues.
It’s a grenade. So fast forward to 12:15. I won’t spoil it for you.
Earlier in the summer Ted’s drummer was arrested for DWI with a golf cart. If you had to do that routine every night to earn a living, you might do the same thing.
Ted drummer: Uncle Ted, do we have to do that tonight?
Ted: STFU, I sign the checks and I salute our soldiers. You won’t be a lazy anti-American bloodsucker as long you’re in my band!
Ted drummer: But my daughter says her friends have all seen it on YouTube and make fun of her! She says they tell her we look like a bunch of old fools playing army and no one knows what it means.
From old DD blog, pre-Tea Party during the Bush years, in a post appropriately entitled “The Dickhead”:
Dick Destiny was mulling over whether the next short entry should be saved for its regular series, The Daily Fallout.
But it’s so exaggerated, even by the gold standard of Congressional war-on-terror utterances, it deserves its own place in the diseased sun.
Chris Shays (Rep. R, Conn.): “I believe there will be a biological attack against this country. I believe there will be a radioactive attack against the country. I even believe there will be a nuclear attack. I have been to Los Alamos and I have seen a weapon made with material you could get from Home Depot. The only thing you need is enriched uranium,” Shays said [in a press conference.]
Two years after Shays uttered the nonsense printed above, he was run out of Congress, beaten by a Democrat.
Chris Shays got beat Tuesday. Crushed, in fact. Vying with Linda McMahon for the right to run on the Republican ticket in Connecticut’s Senate election this fall, he managed only twenty-seven per cent of the vote, to McMahon’s seventy-three per cent.
Normally, someone who’d lost that badly in an under-the-radar primary wouldn’t be worth covering. But Shays isn’t your typical cannon fodder; he’s a former congressman. He represented Connecticut in the House of Representatives for a little over two decades. And he’s one of the last of a dying breed.
Being permanently rid of someone who was no great shakes, because they’ve been done in by someone more to the extreme right, passed off as something unfortunate.
Linda McMahon, Chris Shays — makes no difference, really, just different flavors of horrid.
We have more in common with Greece than most of us believe. In fact, our situation may be worse than Greece, which is the quintessential definition of modern economic doom …
Few of our politicians are willing to even discuss the drastic cuts in spending that would be required just to begin to put America back on the right path. Our politicians would rather ignore the problem and be re-elected by an ever-increasing population of America- hating bloodsuckers …
Voters, at least half and especially those without white skin, now deemed “bloodsuckers.”
Number of times Ted Nugent has called groups or individuals “bloodsuckers” — cited on blog — and universally.
Framing.
The result was anything but righteous and just — as employees tried to hide their ability and exhibit their need — as competition turned from one of achievements to one of sores — and the best men took the role of suckers, and the worst of bloodsuckers. — Essays on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged
It didn’t take us long to see how it all worked out. Any man who tried to play straight, had to refuse himself everything. He lost his taste for any pleasure, he hated to smoke a nickel’s worth of tobacco or chew a stick of gum, worrying if someone had more need for that nickel. He felt ashamed of every mouthful of food he swallowed, wondering whose weary night of overtime had paid for it, knowing that his food was not his by right, miserably wishing to be cheated rather than to cheat, to be a sucker but not a bloodsucker. He wouldn’t marry, he wouldn’t help his folks back home, he wouldn’t put an extra burden on the family … But the shiftless and irresponsible had a field day of it. They bred babies, they got girls into trouble, and dragged in every worthless relative they had from all over the country, every unmarried pregnant sister, for an extra disability allowance, they got more sicknesses than any doctor could disprove, they ruined their clothing, their furniture, their homes — what the hell, ‘the family’ was paying for it. They found more ways of getting in need than any of us could imagine — they developed a special skill for it, which was the only ability they showed. — Atlas Shrugged
The Tea Party unleashed the full measure of its venom on Small Wars Journal today, after discovering Colonel Kevn Benson’s think piece on the US military fighting a future insurrection in Darlington, SC.
The article, a short one, is eclipsed by its effect.
And so the fumes and spittle-flecked rage coming from the Tea Party deserves mention twice today. They detest being painted as bigots and then do everything they must to convince that the assessment is accurate. You see, it’s always the liberty-loving white guys who are the truly persecuted.
Just plain garbage. Nothing but a bunch of bigoted and sterotypical LIES told by a person with no credibility and all in attempt to get others to believe his cons. Typical power-hungry thug who just so happened to join the military all so they could kill. You f’in meet the definition of LIBERAL to the T.
If this scenero were to ever come true, rest assured, people like you will be strung up and hanged on the court house lawn for all to see.
Those who would actually need to invoke the Insurrecton Act would already have conducted the affairs of their offices in such a patently un-American, unethical, illegal, unconstitutional and treasonous manner (anybody we know?) that the elected official should uave already been arrested and put on trial. Only if for a protracted period the citizenry feels patriotically obligated to follow the constitution (the part about abolishing a corrupted government) to the point where knowing the US military will become involved, do it anyway.
Well, here’s your sign: NorthCom, “Homeland” security (wtf???), TSA, FEMA, the 1033 program, Katrina response, drones overflying sovereign borders, car license plates being replace with RFID chips, UN treaties even discussed as possibly being ratified impacting Americans on U.S. soil, unhooking the dollar from oil (look it up; Nixon did us a favor back then), dogs and cats living together, real wrath of God type stuff. And oh, yeah, absence of God.
It is pretty clear where the Author’s politics lie. This whole scenario starts off with the defeat of Obama and an end to his policies.
The intensity of the comments to this article is an interesting clinical study in perceptions and generic response, similar to prodding a tightly coiled and very venomous snake that lies hidden in the shadows.We know the ‘snake’ is there but we do not like to think about its presence.
I am extremely offended by this article. Col. Benson is clearly writing to incite an insurrection here in South Carolina.
Suppose I taught the same course at Leavenworth, and created a scenario where the popular Governor of South Carolina, the Hon. Nikki Haley, was elected president of the United States and Rev. Jessie Jackson (born in Greenville, South Carolina)invaded the state with an army of NAACP types, took over our capitol at Columbia and held president-elect Nikki Haley hostage. Then my old unit from Vietnam, the 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile) had to be recalled from the Middle East to put down the NAACP insurrection, rescue the president elect, and hang the Rev. Jessie Jackson for treason? …
Col. Benson, next time you teach your insane course at Leavenworth, I suggest you start off by showing your officers the movie THE PATRIOT starring Mel Gibson. That will give them a good idea of what would be waiting for them here if they decided to invade South Carolina and treat us like we were Bosnia. Have you ever heard of the Swamp Fox, Francis Marion? He operated not too far from Darlington. Do you know what we did to British Major Tarleton at Cowpens? Do you know that Lt. Col. William Barrett Travis was born down the road from here at Abbyville, South Carolina? Have you ever read his last letter from the Alamo?
Have you considered how you are going to get your federal troops from where they are now, to Darlington, SC? How do you plan to secure your supply lines? Do you really think you will have an easy time in North Carolina or Georgia?
Because our legislative, judicial and executive branches of government hold the 10th Amendment in contempt, I’m beginning to wonder if it would have been best had the South won the Civil War. — Ted Nugent, earlier this year
There is nothing for it now but than to say, flat-out, that Willard Romney has decided that the only way he can become president is to become a racist and to appeal to the racist base of his party. This is the second ad in as many weeks centered on the general theme of The Negro President Wants To Give Your Money To The Black People Like Him…
The Great Recession of the early twenty-first century lasts far longer than anyone anticipated. After a change in control of the White House and Congress in 2012, the governing party cuts off all funding that had been dedicated to boosting the economy or toward relief. The United States economy has flatlined, much like Japan’s in the 1990s, for the better part of a decade. By 2016, the economy shows signs of reawakening, but the middle and lower-middle classes have yet to experience much in the way of job growth or pay raises. Unemployment continues to hover perilously close to double digits, small businesses cannot meet bankers’ terms to borrow money, and taxes on the middle class remain relatively high. A high-profile and vocal minority has directed the public’s fear and frustration at nonwhites and immigrants. After almost ten years of race-baiting and immigrant-bashing by right-wing demagogues, nearly one in five Americans reports being vehemently opposed to immigration, legal or illegal, and even U.S.-born nonwhites have become occasional targets for mobs of angry whites.
In May 2016 an extremist militia motivated by the goals of the “tea party??? movement takes over the government of Darlington, South Carolina, occupying City Hall, disbanding the city council, and placing the mayor under house arrest …
When the leaders of the group hold a press conference to announce their goals, they invoke the Declaration of Independence and argue that the current form of the federal government is not deriving its “just powers from the consent of the governed??? but is actually “destructive to these ends.??? Therefore, they say, the people can alter or abolish the existing government and replace it with another that, in the words of the Declaration, “shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.??? While mainstream politicians and citizens react with alarm, the “tea party??? insurrectionists in South Carolina enjoy a groundswell of support from other tea party groups, militias, racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, anti-immigrant associations such as the Minutemen, and other right-wing groups. At the press conference the masked militia members’ uniforms sport a unit seal with a man wearing a tricorn hat and carrying a musket over the motto “Today’s Minutemen.???
While the rest doesn’t quite live up to the intro, it’s worth a full read. Don’t skip the comments, where the rage of the Tea Party is on full display:
I gave it a rating of one star. This is because there is no way to rate zero stars.
I am asking Congressman Darrell Issa, Chairman of the US House Committe on Oversight and Government Operations to start a congressional investigation into Col. Kevin Benson and to the sort of unAmerican garbage being taught at the Command & Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth. KS.
Dean Allen
www.RattlesnakeRevolution.com
Janet napolitano would be so proud. col Bensn is a traitor in waiting. Your oath is to the Constitution, Col. – not to your masters in the white house. it’s easy enough to see where your coauthor got her bile – Princeton is a well known home for all who hate our great nation – but to get such trash from the highest levels, of our military – even from one who is retired, is shocking indeed. You must be made of the same soft metal as those who serve under this traitorous regime without complaint. You watch as our sons are told not to defend themselves, not to kill those who seek their blood – the same regime that strips them of their right to vote, guts their pay, and sends them to battle without equipment or ammunition. The others who have posted here have covered your ill informed attack on today’s true patriots, the tea party. The one Thing we can all be thankful for is that traitors like yourself feel so free to expose yourselves, now that your fellow travelers have come to power.
Saturday has turned into an embarrassment of riches. Between the new Gekko/Galt ticket and Ted Nugent’s campaigning for it, the laughs just keep coming.
Ted Nugent:
We are heartbroken that the basis of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the 10 Commandments and the Golden Rule has been abandoned for a terrible socialism that has ruined every life it’s come in contact with …
Everybody dead in Aurora was unarmed and helpless. Everybody dead in Milwaukee was unarmed and helpless … That’s what gun control is . . . It’s literally opening the door as wide as possible for evil to do to unarmed and helpless victims what they want.
Mitt Romney made the terrible mistake of banning a certain type of firearm in the past — what they call assault weapons, which is not what they are. But he has seen the light … I spoke with him at length. I am convinced in my absolutist Second Amendment heart and soul that Mitt Romney will never even consider any more infringements on guns, ammo, fire power, access of guns ever again for Americans. He’s learned his lesson … Compared to Barack Obama and his team, Mitt Romney is indeed Michael the Archangel.
Nice bit slyly referencing the Prez as Satan, Ted. Never saw that one coming, no sir.
In it Nugent also espouses the crackpot’s Agenda 21 theory that the UN is conspiring to take small arms and everything else away from American citizens. Developed by the John Birch Society, it has crept into the mainstream as part of the awesome parcel of insane rubbish believed by Tea Party Republicans.
Blessed be and glorious day! Mitt Romney has picked John Galt Jr! Wealthiness, next to Godliness, that’s what Jesus taught. Now it’s time to whip the poor, you know what to do!
