Again stymied in the US, the Cult of EMP Crazy has moved some of its lobbying effort to the United Kingdom.
Electromagnetic pulse doom stories don’t damage the US president as much as middle class unemployment. In the US even the EMP Crazy lobby understands this.
And this partly explains why standard EMP crazies like Newt Gingrich and Frank Gaffney are now flogging Islam-o-phobia. Gaffney is taken care of today over at Armchair Generalist in Conservative Group Proposes Holy War.
Gaffney is an EMP kook, a birther — in other words, he’s notorious.
I’ve dealt with him before here. He represents the core of the cult which is the property of GOP kookery, also sharing double membership with Islam-o-phobes.
Here’s Gaffney — quoted from some newspaper over at AG:
“What if it turns out that some of the people the Obama administration has been embracing are actually promoting the same totalitarian ideology and seditious agenda as al Qaeda, only they’re doing it from White House Iftar dinners?” said Mr. Gaffney, referring to the daily meal eaten by Muslims to break their fast during Ramadan.
With the cult stymied in the US, its big generals sent off to push for total war against Islam, one of the lesser EMP crazies — Avi Schnurr — has been up to devilment in Britain.
New UK defence minister Liam Fox has fallen into the clutches of fearmongering armsbiz lobbyists, according to reports.
The Telegraph reports on a behind-closed-doors speech by Dr Fox at an event today organised by Avi Schnurr, a lobbyist known for pushing the idea that various expensive defence technologies should be developed by Western governments to ward off hostile ballistic missiles and Bond-villain* style electromagnetic pulse strikes. Schnurr is a leading light of both the Israel Missile Defence Association and the Electric Infrastructure Security Council, which hosts Dr Fox today.
“As the nature of our technology becomes more complex, so the threat becomes more widespread,??? the defence secretary’s speech reads, according to the Telegraph.
“There are certain lunatic-fringe analysts who consider that an EMP can be generated easily using conventional explosives and simple equipment easily fabricated in a back-alley bombmaking shop, but in fact even the mighty US military has never succeeded in building a useful conventional EMP weapon, either explosives-pumped or of the electrically-powered High Power Microwave (HPM) type.
Despite all this Mr Schnurr and his like have had a certain amount of success in bigging-up the pulse strike threat in the USA, and lately have crossed the pond. One of Schnurr’s earliest converts here was the Right Honourable James Arbuthnot, Tory chairman of the Parliamentary Defence Committee and relentless arms-industry point man inside the government. Arbuthnot is nowadays a board member of Schnurr’s EIS organisation, and is chairing today’s EIS Summit.
It would seem that Dr Fox has now in turn been recruited by Arbuthnot, at least to the extent of being willing to boost the EMP threat in a speech.
In the piece, Page neatly encompasses the entire world view of the cult — leaving out its kook far right GOP constituency, which — for the sake of the story — has less meaning in the UK. Another component missing in the UK is the bright line of apocalypse mania, this in which the Christian far right’s interest in electromagnetic pulse attack is not so much on avoiding it, but anticipating it because it will, according to them, signal the beginning of the final battle, the return of Jesus, and the eternal damnation of everyone else but them.
The flip side of the EMP crazy coin is also delivered. While Iran or North Korea are menacing us with a civilization-ending electromagnetic attack, we are always alleged to be working on non-nuclear electromagnetic bombs and rays. These are the weapons that have been coming for the last two decades — but never quite arriving.
In fact, the mythology is so entrenched in parts of the big media, you can routinely read made-up rubbish like this, recently published by The Economist:
These days, the idea of detonating a nuclear EMP weapon to disable the radar defences of some rogue dictatorship is politically unthinkable. Defence laboratories have therefore turned their attention instead to producing large electromagnetic pulses by conventional explosives and other means.
One such weapon uses a small charge of explosive to ram an armature down the axis of a current-carrying coil, squeezing its magnetic field so violently in the process that it emits a powerful burst of electromagnetic energy over distances of several hundred metres. Another type employs a Marx generator (a machine used for simulating lightning strikes) to dump a large electrical charge stored in a bank of capacitors into a specially shaped antenna.
American defence forces have converted a number of cruise missiles to function as non-nuclear EMP generators. Apparently, cars parked up to 300 metres away have had their alternators, ignition coils and engine controls disabled this way. Such e-weapons are said to have been used in Kosovo, the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan.
Afghanistan. Yeah, we attacked the infrastructure of the Taliban in Marja with electromagnetic pulse rays and bombs. That’s why things are going so good.
Ted Nugent suggested torching the Muslim world with more precision munitions a couple weeks ago in the WaTimes. It was part of the general extremist GOP reaction to park51.
The jump-out graf was:
Slice it any way you want, but the Muslim community is being tremendously rude and stupid for wanting to build a mosque so close to Ground Zero in New York City. Instead of using the $100 million for their proposed mosque, I recommend that the Muslims donate the cash to the U.S. military so we can build more smart bombs to kill more radical, voodoo Muslims …
Not all Muslims are religious whacks who deserve a bullet …
Nugent picked up the thread again today at Human Events, with a column that will probably be republished in the WaTimes.
It reads:
While our legal system is far from perfect, it is vastly superior to the Muslim religious court system that ignores justice. I assume that makes Allah giddy with joy. Order up more virgins
Facts are facts. Muslims in the Middle East have zero respect for other religions.
The entirety is here, entitled Muslim Hate Crimes.
The essay begins with the statement that Ted doesn’t support burning the Koran. After this superficial pleasantry, Nugent delivers the meat implying the opposite: Muslims are subhuman.
It is another example of profound failure afoot in our country.
Very bad times have made that which should have no place at the table acceptable.
He is startlingly often too rude and extreme for the mass of old white cranks who believe the US government — and western progressive civilization in general — to be an abomination.
That Nugent is popular on any TV network (even Fox) is a disgrace another sign of the times.
That he has a readership at all — and he has a significant one — is discouraging. It’s an admission you believe your audience deserves shit sandwiches because a steroidally inflammatory attitude trumps everything.
Here is an example of Nugent’s prose:
The real insult is that President Obama and others spent more time and energy on the Florida pastor than they have actually condemning Muslims for their numerous condemnable and criminal acts against Christians and people of other faiths living in the Middle East.
This religious-inspired Neanderthal behavior is much more disgusting and condemnable than the pastor who wants to burn the Koran or the Christian creeps who show up at the funerals of military heroes with signs that say “God Hates Fags.”
Excluding the weird non-sequitur at the end, copy editors must surely be in tears over the repetitive misuse of the root word, condemn.
Yeah, we get it, Ted. You hate Muslims. And you can’t write.
It is a mystery to DD why not one music journalist has taken Ted Nugent to the mat over his public record. Nugent is an easy target, like many in the Tea Party and the GOP.
And it explains part of the failure of the Democratic Party’s argument, defined by the gut realization that many in the party are just too scared to take on the extremists. They lack spine.
All of the music journalists I know are liberal. Privately, they are appalled by such beliefs. But when they’re needed in the clutch, required to call a spade a spade, they’re just not there.
Don’t ask us about Nugent, they say, shrugging their shoulders.
Ted Nugent lost most of his Michigan audience and fled to Waco, TX, for very clear reasons. He despises the middle class despite insincerely professing the opposite — particularly in Detroit because of the auto industry and the demography of the inner city, chisels his bottom-out-of-sight fans for autographs, likes sucking up to celebrities on Fox and is an Ayn Randian kook by way of proxy admiration for nuts GOP pols who have read Atlas Shrugged and adored Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead.
Called Citizens for Liberty, it’s your standard collection of white Tea Party crazies — global warming is a hoax, Obamacare must be repealed, stimulus money to South Dakota for schools and public services is a drug that will addict the people to the Federal government.
The Tea Party candidate is Kristi Noem, who will be sharing the stage with Nugent. Like everyone else from the party, she’s someone from the American extremist fringe, but interestingly so.
A SD newspaper article notes Noem’s stellar record as a driver: 27 citations in 21 years. However, according to the newspaper, her Dem opponent also drives fast and speeding tickets seem to be a way of life in South Dakota, a state which has only 800,000 some people living in it.
Along with speeding, Noem’s 27 citations include not wearing a seat belt, two instances of running a stop sign, expired license-plate tags and no driver’s license. She missed court appearance or payment dates seven times. And in two instances, the court issued a warrant to force payment.
Noem points out that she did end up paying all of her fines, even if some were late.
Noem’s total of 20 speeding tickets in 21 years is “certainly
above average, but really not all that uncommon.???
It isn’t that uncommon in Noem’s family, based on court records
since 1989. Noem’s husband, Bryon, had 18 recorded traffic
citations during that period, 11 of them for speeding. Noem’s
brother, Rock Arnold, had 34 citations during that period, 25 of
them for speeding. He also missed court or fine payment dates four
times and had warrants issued three times. Another brother, Robb,
had 21 citations, including 12 for speeding.
And here’s me performing coincidentally perfect musical accompaniment, “Highway Patrol,” in 1985.
A NY Times column noted by Digby puts forward the mainstreaming of extremism and incivility as normal public discourse, a point I’ve made in connection with Ted Nugent all summer.
The problem is that elite media gatekeepers have abandoned their moral mandate to stigmatize uncivil discourse. Instead, too many outlets reward it. In fact, it is an ironic token of the ideological confusions of our age that they do so in the service of upholding what they understand to be a cornerstone of civility: the notion that every public question must be framed in terms of two equal and opposite positions, the “liberal” one and the “conservative” one, each to be afforded equal dignity, respect — and (the more crucial currency) equal space. This has made the most mainstream of media outlets comically easy marks for those actively working to push public discourse to extremes.
And so the mainstream is now defined by a balance between the reasonable and a demographic that represents nothing but the worst from the American fringe haunch — cranks, kooks and bigots, all aimed at tearing down what any modern western nation should stand for.
The media has no skin in this game, though. It has nothing to lose when it gives the crazies the megaphone.
Its marquee employees are all upper class and they’ll do fine, even when the nation lurches into disaster if the insane take over a part of government in November. It’s more entertainment for them, more opportunities for bigtime books on the subject, more television face time. More of everything while the rest shrivel up in the decay outside the mansions.
But back to Ted Nugent who was on radio prior to his Labor Day weekend show in Detroit.
The only parts of interest on this blog are Ted making excuses about his hunting screw-up and the standard misrepresentations of his various accomplishments.
I did a rough transcript and after exchanging opening pleasantries, Ted is asked about his hunting violations.
“What a klusterbuck the court system is. I wish I could talk more about it now but it’s still ongoing … Bottom line, I broke no laws.”
It was, Ted insists, part of a campaign against his Spirit of the Wild program. Animal rights activists and others who hate him watch it for all transgressions and harass him regularly.
“They monitor my Spirit of the Wild program … because it’s California they are overwhelmed with people who really can’t stand me …”
Ted explains that on his show he is shown killing three deer with captions saying when he shot them properly. One in one calendar year, two in another. But that this was used against him.
“Here it is … This is the perfect point, on this one show, I killed three deer, you’re only allowed two a year. We got thousands of calls at our office, people squallering that I killed three deer in one year…”
The conversation moves to the Park51 prayer center.
“Well, I would certainly welcome you guys [to my website]. On my website you see literally thousands and thousands of columns.”
Ted refers to his opinions at the Washington Times and Human Events.
“I get more hits than almost everybody … I reflected what I think is common sense America … I can’t think of anything more cruel and more intentionally outrageous than the Japanese building a monument at Pearl Harbor in 1942 …
“This imam … the jury is still out … he is not a friend of America.”
The radio DJ’s say the man is in the employ of the US State Department.
That is because, Ted replies, “We have the Mao Tse Tung Fan Club in the Whitehouse.”
Here is what Nugent wrote about the issue at the Washington Times, none of which is actually re-read on the air:
“Slice it any way you want, but the Muslim community is being tremendously rude and stupid for wanting to build a mosque so close to Ground Zero in New York City. Instead of using the $100 million for their proposed mosque, I recommend that the Muslims donate the cash to the U.S. military so we can build more smart bombs to kill more radical, voodoo Muslims …
“Not all Muslims are religious whacks who deserve a bullet …”
“Where the Muslims will claim they are wanting to build bridges, they will stab you in the eye less than a mile from Ground Zero,” Ted tells the DJ’s at one point.
The conversation moves on to Mexico, Arizona and illegal immigration. At one point Ted insinuates terrorists are coming over the border. The code is “otm’s” for other-than-Mexicans.”
On the President: “This guy is out of his mind.”
The DJ’s chime in: “Harry Reid and these sons of bitches …”
When the interview finally gets to music, Ted informs he would really like to have Kid Rock on his next album.
Nugent adds that he drew “45,000 at Fond-Du-Lac. I hold the the attendance record at every county fair in Wisconsin.”
While there is no reason to doubt the last sentence on being big in the hinterlands of Wisconsin, the reality is a little more nuanced:
From the local Fond-Du-Lac Reporter, actually reprinted at tednugent.com:
45,000 turn out for Fair
July 28, 2010
Ted Nugent brought out the fans for this year’s Fond du Lac County Fair.
About 45,000 people attended the 159th Fair, held July 20-25 at the County Fairgrounds on Martin Avenue. Fair Manager Matt Immel said it’s an impressive figure, considering how much it rained during this year’s event.
Saturday recorded the highest attendance of any day, with 15,000 people passing through the gates. Immel said Ted Nugent drew the big crowd; his concert sold 700 VIP tickets. The fair normally sells 600 VIP tickets at $15 apiece, but there was enough demand to add more seats.
Over five days, of which Ted Nugent was there on one, the fair drew 45,000. One third came on Saturday when Nugent played the grandstand. Common sense requires the concession that not everyone was there to see and hear Ted Nugent.
It is a bit underwhelming, much like Pine Grove Area High School’s football field grandstand, or any outdoor bleechers in some out of the way place.
For the purposes of comparison and conversation, the Rose Bowl in Pasadena holds 92,000, twice the capacity reported over five days at the Fond-du-Lac fair.
DD thinks readers can agree the Fond-du-Lac fair grandstand is not even close to a quarter of the Rose Bowl, which would be a generous 25,000.
DD thinks 700 to 1,000 is about right, absolute tops.
Ted Nugent was also recently reviewed in Des Moines — by a reporter for Grand View College’s student newspaper.
Ted Nugent didn’t waste a minute making his political views heard on Wednesday at the 7 Flags Event Center. The 62-year-old Nuge rocked the stage in front of 2,000 “American Blood Brothers.”
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For a man who hasn’t released an album in over 15 years (wrong — but irrelevant to the essence of the review), Ted has a surprisingly large following. The majority of the crowd was at least 50 years old. That might be how I arrived 45 minutes before the doors opened, was the seventh person in the doors and stood front row for the entire show.
The stage was filled with big guns, small guns, machine guns, grenades and an air brushed canvas backdrop that showed Ted yielding guns and driving a tank over the top of Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
The show wasn’t all political bashing, however. Ted took the stage and played four songs before stopping to catch his breath and welcome the sold out crowd. He was welcomed with an arousing ovation from the mix of military personnel, hunters, veterans and rock enthusiasts.
=========
The show wasn’t all redneck racism. Ted, being from Detroit, recognized his influences, Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson, by playing a few covers that sent the crowd into a frenzy. Nugent preached to always remember where you come from and thank those who made you who you are today.
As an avid hunter and rock and roll fan, I found the Ted Nugent concert to be an awesome experience.
“The show wasn’t all redneck racism.” Good to know.
Although you might not know it from the official press, they didn’t care for him in Kennewick, WA. Outside of House of Blues dates in the big coastal metropolises, he played only small clubs, casinos and rural fairgrounds. He was rebuked in Dubuque. And he managed to soil his reputation in his beloved sport of hunting.
On Labor Day, Nugent comes back to his former home — Detroit — to play a theatre gig where he recorded a 2008 live album.
Unionized public employees with their sweetheart deals at taxpayer expense are one significant reason why some cities and states are in such dire financial condition.
Unionized public employees have better deals than the taxpayers who are funding them. Federal employees make twice as much as their private-sector peers. This is all beyond bizarro.
===
Unionized public employees with their sweetheart deals at taxpayer expense are one significant reason why some cities and states are in such dire financial condition.
Notice that in this piece he says “unionized public employees.” That would seem to preclude the auto industry.
Ted also kind of tries to separate federal government workers from state public sector employees, before slamming the latter, too. However, all are solidly middle class. And these are the same people who’s jobs the federal government has been endeavoring to save this summer by sending funding to the states in the face of total opposition from the GOP.
So Ted is actually hating on school teachers and policemen in Michigan, too. And if the FBI, or any government agency has offices in Michigan — which they do, all of them.
And he implies that compensation for unionized middle class labor is unfair without commenting on the pay for corporate American bosses. Or getting across the point that one of the reasons non-unionized middle class jobs pay more poorly than unionized has been the profoundly anti-labor climate that has been born in corporate America over the past few decades.
In the past, Ted has also been quite specific in his contempt for Detroit auto-workers and his wishes for their industry. He wanted it to die. It was wasteful and deserved to end.
Taxpayers should not be held accountable to bailout the automobile industry or any other industry for that matter. There is constitutional authority for the decades of poor management decisions, forecasting and labor deals that have put GM, the U.S.’s largest automobile maker, perilously close to going belly up.
======
While the [United Auto Workers] may believe GM, Ford and Chrysler are in business to provide automotive workers a salary and other costly benefits, the reality is that car companies are in business to make a profit. Period. Write that down.
The UAW’s costly benefit demands over the years coupled with weak automotive management who historically caved into the UAW’s demands put the automotive bolts, so to speak, to the shareholders and, to a certain degree, has put the Big Three on the path to possible extinction.
====
Bailing out GM with billions of taxpayer dollars is the wrong approach. GM is not too big to fail. What GM may be is too unprofitable to stay in business.
The most singular paradox in Ted Nugent’s life may be that his steady decline in popularity mirrors the destruction of manufacturing jobs for the middle class in the US. His music, muscled and steely, was the sound of Detroit and his audience was the middle class. And now, in his older years, the man — shriveled from what he once was — rails against the very interests of the people who filled the stadiums he played in.
It’s tragic.
The final nail in the coffin in Michigan may have come when Ted was thrown off the bill of the Muskegon [Michigan] Summer Celebration a few years ago for being his usual mean old self. This was a big thing.
The show was an $80,000 gig and while Nugent was eventually paid in a breach of contract suit, the fallout from it hurt him. (DD has discussed that case here.)
Nugent eventually left Michigan for Waco, Texas. And while assorted cream puff music journalists have asked Ted this summer whether he might run for political office, given his views, he’s unelectable wherever there is still an informed middle class. Even in this toxic climate. And that rules out almost his entire old home state. Ted knows it, too.
Ted Nugent, elected to represent places like Detroit, Flint, Kalamazoo, Ann Arbor or Lansing? Surely you must be joking.
Now, as for Waco or Crawford, Texas? Maybe.
Ted’s return to Michigan for a Labor Day gig has generated local advance press. Typically, no one brings up the very bad odor of Ted’s attitudes and politics toward Detroit.
The only significant item appeared in the Royal Oak newspaper, a reprint of a trivial Gary Graff wire news piece which was published at Billboard a few days ago.
And did Graff ask Nugent about what he thought of the auto unions now, for a Labor Day gig? Nope. That would be possibly rife with unpleasantness.
Again, consider the pure Dickensian character — Ted Nugent — writing an anti-labor Labor Day column while preparing for his show in Detroit:
It’s a piece in which he superficially laments mass unemployment (and taking the standard GOP shot at those too discouraged to look for work) while simultaneously denigrating middle class unionized workers, blaming them for the economic catastrophe.
Ted Nugent’s appearance at the Benton Franklin fair in Kennewick, WA, brought on fear and loathing in the locals. Shocked, they were just shocked — by Ted’s foul language, heard for miles around, courtesy of the rock ‘n’ roll megawatt PA.
Ironically, the fairgoers were probably politically more to the side of the views expressed in the Nuge’s extremist WaTimes columns. Than, for example, the politics here.
The paradox: When you see the demographic, it’s these people in a video from the Beck rally and featured at Digby.
They’re rural white know-nothings. But they’re really nice know-nothings and they believe their children ought not to be exposed to the unwholesome.
And then they’re force-fed a dose of what Ted Nugent is really like.
Ted’s been held up, the entire summer, as someone who defiantly stands for free speech, liberty and family values. And this is usually done in entertainment sections and on opinion pages run by the stupid and disingenuous. With very few exceptions, he’s praised as a prince of a fellow in possession of strong opinions, delivered with amusing and/or charming idiosyncrasy.
And then reality occasionally rudely interrupts. The extremist comes to town. And he’s too strong a cup of tea, even more off the hook than the local more polite extremists.
Inevitably they wonder how did it get to be so mainstream? They need to look in a mirror.
Here are some excerpts from the letters page at the Kennewick paper (note the absence of what generally shouts his obscenities in connection with — the president, other Dem politicians — it’s just the profanity they noticed):
I understand that Mr. Nugent is a hard rocker, but his performance was vulgar and inappropriate for the setting. He said the foulest of vulgarities many times, and even put the word mother in front of it once before I left during the third song. There were children of all ages in the main stage area … Read more…
=====
What rock did they find Ted Nugent under? I am very angry at the choice of words used during his concert. I understand that Ted Nugent is like this — but at a fair with children? Were they so desperate to have Ted that they couldn’t put a few rules in place and remember their own mission statement. More …
======
I have never been so astonished and mad as I was on the evening of Aug. 26 when my wife and I attended the Benton Franklin County Fair.
Ted Nugent was performing (?) onstage, cursing, shouting obcenities, screaming at the top of his voice, etc. All while in the presence of many young children.
Ted Nugent stands for freedom and liberty! I must say, if the f-bomb is all you heard, then maybe it was all you were choosing to hear. Because I heard him thanking the men and women of the military who fight for this country and defend our freedom with their lives! I also heard him stand up for the American people and this great country!
Didn’t Joe Biden whisper in President Obama’s ear for all to hear on TV, “This is a big f-ing deal!” More …
If I were President Obama, I’d be doing all I could to head off [the prospect of GOP control in Congress], offering some major new initiatives on the economic front in particular, if only to shake up the political dynamic. But my guess is that the president will continue to play it safe, all the way into catastrophe.
Imagine! It takes s summer of columns in the New York Times, written by a Nobel laureate, to get the guy to do something, anything — almost nothing.
And over the weekend, the smartest response he can come up with over the Fox News Network’s building him up as an illegitimate president until a quarter of the electorate believes he’s Muslim is that it doesn’t worry him?
What?
It’ll work him over good when all the junior league Ted Nugents get put in charge of Congress.
Ted Nugent did more than rock the Benton Franklin Fair on Thursday night.
He rankled family fairgoers who could hear him dropping repeated F-bombs and other coarse words over the loudspeaker throughout the fairgrounds.
Known for his hard rocking and big mouth, the Motor City Madman didn’t disappoint his fans. But dozens of others have been calling and e-mailing fair organizers and commenting on the Herald’s website, upset about his rowdy language.
The first letter to the editor complaining about the show came in at 9:12 p.m. Thursday — while Nugent still was on stage.
“Nugent needs his mouth washed out with soap — that green pine stuff my mother used — and the fair board needs to tune up its entertainment practices,” said another letter writer, Kirk Williamson of Kennewick.
Jennifer L. Mangum commented Friday on the Herald’s Facebook page: “What rock did they find Ted Nugent under. I am very angry at (the) choice of words used during his concert. … Were they so desperate to have Ted that they couldn’t put a few rules in place and remember their own Mission Statement.”
Fair Manager Lori Lancaster said Friday, “He went way beyond what was appropriate. … We are not happy about it.”
She said fair officials checked on his performances at other fairs and were told there were no problems.
Yeah, right. F-bomb intermezzos from Ted’s casino and fairs tour have been on YouTube all summer.
Also, about half the profanity, sometimes more, is used in conjunction with hates on various politicians, including the president.
“On Friday, [an official] said the fair board will be talking about the issue at its next meeting,” reported the newspaper.
Many small-city reporters have ‘interviewed’ Ted this summer. Since they do no research, they are easily gulled into allowing the rocker to do an e-mailer with them. Ted is now notorious for using the same stock answers, cut-and-pasted into his editing software, then sent off for the local rube.
The result has been that observers see the same Nugent phrases and sentences over and over, like this one:
Hunting, fishing and trapping are the last perfect natural environmental positives available to mankind, and my ultra-intense soulful American music is the soundtrack of defiance against the brain-dead denial of political correctness against my hunting lifestyle.
That would be impolite, impertinent and harder work, too. It’s always better to mainstream the extremist, to make him seem like a reasonable fellow, albeit with slightly colorful and entertaining quirks. And then Ted surprises folks at places like the Benton Fair, or in Dubuque, where they’re startled by what he’s really like.
“How could this have happened?” ask the local burgomeisters.
In the event that Hitler No. 2 launches a military strike against Israel because of the economic sanctions or for any other reason, let’s hope our military has plans to destroy every critical power-generation station, its communication and electronics grids, key bridges and other critical infrastructure. Iran will need to be reduced to the pre-Stone Age. Let’s make it so AA batteries don’t even work in Iran.
How’d they do that? How do you have a bomb Iran column, complete with Hitler and Poland metaphors, without having the nitty-gritty in it about actually bombing Iran?
I’ve often stated that music journalists are largely creampuffs.
They can’t be counted upon to do anything difficult, to lance even the easiest boils. It’s not all their fault. When your job security and opportunities demand you be a creampuff, you do what you gotta do.
Take today’s Billboard. Years ago, Billboard had no trouble reporting that Ted Nugent had been tossed off a radio show for remarks that were thought to be bigoted.
Today, however, Billboard published a brief interview with Nugent. It was remarkable for actually asking Ted about his recent run-in with the law over his hunting faux pas. No other journalist on his summer tour, or any sports section wildlife journalist has chosen, so far, to pin him on it.
Nugent, to use his love of hunting as a framing piece, presents a target rich environment.
From a couple weeks ago:
Nugent was originally facing a charge of killing a “spike??? — an immature buck — on the program but the charge was dropped during negotiations between his attorney and the Yuba County District Attorney’s Office, said Foy.
A spike is a deer with two antlers that have not yet “forked,??? Foy said.
A Department of Fish and Game warden saw the show in March and “just about fell out of his chair??? when he saw Nugent with the buck, according to Foy.
A subsequent investigation led to the baiting charge.
Nugent originally faced 11 charges, including killing a deer too young to be hunted. In a deal with Yuba County prosecutors, attorney Jack Kopp entered no contest pleas Friday to the two misdemeanors on behalf of Nugent, who did not appear in court.
A Nugent spokeswoman did not immediately return messages left late Tuesday.
All of this is easy to find if you have access to Lex-Nex, or even more easily, Google.
With his tour wrapping up on Sept. 5 in his home town of Detroit, Nugent plans to spend the late summer and early fall hunting bear and moose in Canada and deer in Wisconsin before hitting the studio in December with his band — bassist Greg Smith and drummer Mick Brown — at producer David Zaijcek’s studio in the same Texas village where Nugent now resides. “I love the convenience,” he explains. “I love being able to hunt in the morning, then go rock my balls off the rest of the day. It’s called balance. My spirit has never been more positive or energized.”
Nugent’s hunting did get him in a bit of trouble recently when he plead no contest to misdemeanor charges of killing an immature and baited buck during a taping of his Outdoor Channel show “Spirit of the Wild” in February. Nugent, who did not bait the deer but rather killed it in too close proximity to a baited area, paid a $1,750 fine for violating California hunting laws.
“I did not use bait, I didn’t see any bait and nobody in our group used any bait,” says Nugent, who was hunting with others during the trip. “We were only 100 yards from an apple orchard. Is that bait? I don’t know … I thought about fighting it and we probably could have won, but they were putting a lot of pressure on me and I pled no contest pretty much to save my buddies, who did nothing wrong, either.”
A good reporter might have asked Nugent for the original indictment before publishing the self-serving quote. Someone responsible might have even gone to PACER and spent an entire fifteen minutes looking for Nugent’s case file.
A proper journalist might have brought up the issue that Nugent’s own cable show, Spirit of the Wild, was the original evidence which inspired the charges levied against him. And that it had been discussed in hunting circles in February. With Nugent generally coming out as the loser.
A real journalist, as opposed to a creampuff, might have even tarried to ask Nugent about the race-baiting columns he’s had published all summer long in the Washington Times or the incident in Dubuque which caused the town newspaper’s editorial page to condemn him.
Someone with guts might have chosen to make Nugent actually look at himself in a mirror, for a change.
Good job, Billboard and Gary Graff! Get that news on Nugent’s next album, supposedly featuring “‘ stone cold motherf***king songs’ ready to go when he takes his band into the studio later this year … ”
Given his twice weekly WaTimes column, the Nuge still takes no time to explain his deer-baiting fiasco, one that’s generated more news in a week than his tour the entire summer.
There are no words to express the outrage Americans would have expressed if the Japanese government had proposed to build a memorial to their fallen soldiers at Pearl Harbor immediately following World War II. We can only hope President Truman would have ordered our military to carpet-bomb and firebomb the Japanese again for being so rude and stupid.
Slice it any way you want, but the Muslim community is being tremendously rude and stupid for wanting to build a mosque so close to Ground Zero in New York City. Instead of using the $100 million for their proposed mosque, I recommend that the Muslims donate the cash to the U.S. military so we can build more smart bombs to kill more radical, voodoo Muslims.
“Not all Muslims are religious whacks who deserve a bullet,” though, the Nuge adds.
By now, it’s obvious Ted Nugent simply cannot write a column that isn’t reprehensible. It’s why the WaTimes opinion page loves him. It gives the newspaper’s editorial art department an opportunity to monster someone in cartoon form twice a week.
So the cant is always standard crazy and depressing Ted. And a machine could have predicted he would recommend we carpet bomb Islam for having such bad manners as to start this mosque affair.
Remarkably, Nugent has spent the entire summer race-baiting and spreading intolerance from the stage and in his columns. And only one journalist — a woman at the Dubuque newspaper — called him on it. In every other interview — he does them all by e-mail — and concert review, Nugent has been passed off as mostly a colorful wacky fellow, an amusing guy, with controversial right-wing views. He has been part of the mainstreaming of ignorance and extremism as the new normals.
Here’s another example of the stenography Nugent gets. Asking him about hunting, the reporter doesn’t bring up Nugent’s latest travail. And Nugent does not take the opportunity to enlighten:
“Hunting, fishing and trapping are the last perfect natural environmental positives available to mankind, and my ultra-intense soulful American music is the soundtrack of defiance against the brain-dead denial of political correctness against my hunting lifestyle.”
The rest is here. But there’s no point in going to it.
While Nugent’s deer-baiting news generated quite a few short stories, not a single sportswriter on the hunting beat in American newspapers chose to call him up mid-tour and quiz him on it.
All the more remarkable because it had been on television as part of his cable show, Spirit of the Wild, in February.
It illuminates another part of Nugent’s career and audience.
I’ve referred to them regularly as bottom-out-of-sighters, a term pulled from Paul Fussell. In the book Class, Fussell described bottom-out-of-sighters as uneducated white people of such shallow pocket, no advertisers were interested in them. They were, he said, those who watched roller derby and old pro-wrestling on Saturday morning. Or people who traded videotaped highlights of the best hockey brawls.
Nugent’s cable TV audience is the same. Hunters knew about Nugent’s screw up in February. It’s how he was caught and prosecuted. But Nugent’s audience is so small and isolated from the rest of the mainstream, an audience so undesirable — the likes of power-drinkers and fans of ultimate fighting or crush video — by the money-makers in mass media, the news didn’t leak out. (Paradoxically, Nugent knew all this was coming down for months. He had time to get ahead of it, to prepare some statement.)
The news didn’t even carry in the outsdoorsman community, which gave Nugent some award for being the most admired celebrity hunter about a month ago. In the real world, this would be like Sports Illustrated honoring Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens for clean lifestyle.
As Nugent has traveled the country and given his e-mail interviews this summer, it’s become obvious that has a standard set of answers — a script for recitation. In interview, he uses the cut-and-paste function of his e-mailer.
He relies on stock phrases and stories, repeating them without variation. He is the soul man. He plays soul music, all his heroes are black. And another of his favored riffs has been on the ‘drooling, puking and dying hippies’ of those olden days.
A form of this appeared in a number of newspapers this summer:
“I give enormous credit to my hunting and outdoor lifestyle for fortifying me to make smart choices in life. Not only was I forbidden to indulge in any substance abuse growing up, but once I witnessed the pathetic, stinky, drooling, puking, dying hippies.”
