The death tax should be eliminated permanently, capital gains slashed to next to nothing, and the George W. Bush tax cuts made permanent.
If it occurs to Ted that the far right policies he espouses have destroyed the middle class in this country, he never shows it.
Paradoxically, that was his audience. And the bottom-out-of-sighters who follow him around during his tour of Indian gaming casinos now were also part of it.
With less and less income, they will see to it that Ted continues to keep ticket prices lean. And that he plays only country fairs where his show is included with the price of admission and establishments where the teetotaler can watch from the stage as others drink a lot.
In Ted’s WaTimes column, the former Motor City Madman complains that no one in the White House knows how to run a business.
Ted knows this because he doesn’t know how to run one.
Take tednugent.com.
On his website, Ted thinks he can charge for the same columns we read for free at the WaTimes and Human Events. That’s just plain dumb.
Ted calls these things his “SpiritWild Writings” and he wears an Indian headdress. Perhaps this explains his new penchant for playing casinos.
Once again, it’s worth emphasizing that Ted’s extremist politics are aimed at wiping out his old audience. He wants to live in a country where there’s no taxation, no government except for the military and absolutely no paying for a social contract or anything associated with a civilized western nation that has a middle class.
There may be a bit of sense to this.
If Ted thinks that in a few years most of his bread will be buttered by writing polemics and books as a crazy old antic butler for the upper class, it’s not a bad strategy to recommend things that endear you to them as often as possible.
In other pertinent news, Yahoo published a survey including statistics showing the accelerating destruction of what’s left of the the middle class.
Wealth and power are rapidly becoming concentrated at the top and the big global corporations are making massive amounts of money. Meanwhile, the American middle class is being systematically
wiped out of existence as U.S. workers are slowly being merged into the new “global” labor pool.
What do most Americans have to offer in the marketplace other than their labor? Not much. The truth is that most Americans are absolutely dependent on someone else giving them a job. But today, U.S. workers are “less attractive” than ever. Compared to the rest of the world, American workers are extremely expensive, and the government keeps passing more rules and regulations seemingly on a monthly basis that makes it even more difficult to conduct business in the United States.
So corporations are moving operations out of the U.S. at breathtaking speed. Since the U.S. government does not penalize them for doing so, there really is no incentive for them to stay.
Damn those benefits like health insurance and all those pesky regulations for keeping the local environment clean and seeing that people do not get an entirely shitty deal.
“Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009 … Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 – the highest rate in 20 years,” it reads..
Today’s Nugent column at the WaTimes is remarkable for one thing.
For the first time in many weeks, the Nuge does not mention the “Mao Zedong fan club.” Plus no run-on sentences as eye-poppingly awesome as the critter the Nuge gave birth to two weeks ago.
A copy editor may have been working extra hard. Or perhaps another ghost-writer was hired to give Ted a bit of a hand.
However, it didn’t help a great deal.
Ted is plagued by paranoid conspiracy thinking, nicked — as usual — from the broadcasts of Glenn Beck. He is, as you’ll see, determined to get the word out that he’s being attacked using methods from all those on the Beck-approved enemies list.
[The] Democratic machine will work overtime once again to demonize conservatives and the Republican Party as jingoists, racists, anti-civil-rights, anti-immigration, anti-minority and even anti-Mexican. I know, as I previously have been the target of its vicious personal lying attacks and smear campaigns straight out of the playbook of Richard Andrew Cloward, Frances Fox Piven and Saul Alinsky.
Ted’s the real McCoy in rock guitar, a total original. In prose, he’s a weak imitator, always working to make a good impression at Fox News.
Teacher, teacher! I just worked Mr. Beck’s three most hated people — Richard Andrew Cloward, Frances Fox Piven and Saul Alinsky — into a single sentence!
See here. An old lady is persecuting you, Ted? Really now. That’s a new low.
Here’s Piven, framing it in 2009, after being demonized by Beck.
Excerpted from the YouTube interview:
The idea is to say everything would be nice in American society if it weren’t for these Columbia professors. If it wasn’t for their nasty scheming, no financial crisis. Can you think of anything sillier than to attribute the financial crisis to an article published in a low circulation magazine in 1966?
However, Nugent’s current column is primarily aimed at describing another massive conspiracy — how the Obama administration and Democratic Party will enslave and destroy Mexican immigrants, just like it did with black society.
And that Republicans are, therefore, the best friends of Mexicans because they don’t want that:
[Look] at what the Democrats have done to black America over the past 50 years. What once was a proud, strong people now lies in ruin because of Fedzilla programs designed specifically to enslave and destroy instead of liberate and build. Amazingly, black Americans still overwhelming vote for Democrats. Be wise and learn from their mistakes.
It looks to be as full of made-up rubbish as everything else he has done, which according to Media Matters, is plenty:
That’s right. Breitbart, delusional nut that he is, thinks that his and Frank Gaffney’s “reputations” will help “provide a check and balance” that will keep the site from publishing “false information or propaganda.”
Good grief.
Breitbart’s “reputation” is that of a liar whose websites run wild with fringe conspiracy theories. Gaffney himself fits right in, with a record of pushing bizarre, obviously false claims
Gaffney is a card-carrying original member of the Cult of EMP Crazy from when Pennsy GOP kook Curt Weldon was in the House of Representatives. Weldon was and is also part of the Cult. And he was also certain that Soviet suitcase nukes were on the loose.
However, Weldon was run off the reservation permanently by voters when the FBI started investigating him for influence peddling in 2006. But Gaffney thought he was tops.
“The nightmare scenario is this: A rogue nation like North Korea or a stateless terrorist like Bin Laden gets hold of a nuclear weapon and decides not to drive it into a large city but rather to launch it on a Scud-type missile straight into the atmosphere from a barge off the East Coast,” claimed Gaffney.
Many years ago, Gaffney was not quite so famous as the crank he is now. He just hated on arms control, non-proliferation pacts and peace. The right-wing GOP noise machine changed that, giving him bigtime amplification, allowing him to reveal his much broader tastes.
“You may remember Gaffney from his crackpot claim earlier this year — published on Breitbart’s Big Government, no less! — that the Missile Defense Agency’s ‘new’ logo ‘appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo,’ which Gaffney identified as a ‘nefarious’ ‘symbolic action’ that he suggested represented an ‘act of submission to Shariah,’ continued Media Matters.
Wait. The last bit is a DD joke. Sun Tzu was never a member of the Cult of EMP Crazy. But he is part of Big Peace. Go ahead, click that link. Don’t worry about feeding the trolls.
Big Peace was announced with a bang, according to Media Matters.
To DD, it wouldn’t seem to matter so much. Its many gobble-wallahs from the far right have already been getting whatever needs to be written published in many other older crank venues like the WaTimes, Family Security Matters, blogs at the Heritage Foundation, Human Events, the Examiner and World Net Daily.
Its very practical function is as another glorified spam machine, the standard tool of the GOP.
Hard to watch warning: DD jumped on the grenades so you don’t have to.
Lonely Frank Gaffney, ranting and screeching at the EMPAct America conference. Turn down the volume. Eleven views and rising fast.
Lonely Frank, lamenting — in 2009 — the Obama administration’s fascination with health care reform and energy policy, instead of electromagnetic pulse attack. Which would result in the “cratering” of the United States.
Curt Weldon at EMPAct America. SCUD in a tub, electromagnetic pulse doom presents us with a “moral dilemma.” Lose some weight, already.
As said, an unauthorized book on Ted Nugent as a portrait in US extremism occurred to me while recently looking over the the stuff in the blog tab I’ve archived on the guy.
It looked like a good basis for an outline because Nugent publicly shows a form of destructive and irrational extremism which has always been present on the fringes of society. But which how now been mainstreamed with barely anyone blinking an eye.
Nugent’s politics are essentially the same as the white ricin kooks I used to write about years ago.
His is the philosophy of the survivalist nuts who wrote things like The Poor Man’s James Bond, a stupidly mean series of books — always found on the bookshelves of loner white weapons freaks bound for jail, packed with articles on how to make guns, bombs, ammo, poisons, incendiaries and boobytraps in case the tyrannical government was coming for you.
Part of the come-on adorning the back of Kurt Saxon’s Poor Man’s James Bond reads thusly:
Also, in the event that our nation is invaded by Foreign Devils, it is up to you to destroy them with speed and vigor. Or — and perish the thought — if our Capitol should fall to the enemy within, I expect you to do your duty.
Ten years ago that was still the domain of the total crackpot, someone who had to self-publish to get the word out. Not so, anymore, as a listen to Ted Nugent and Alex Jones proved in about fifty seconds over the weekend.
Nugent now signs off a growing number of his columns with blandishments to go “varmint hunting” with “no bag limit.” He tacks it to the election in November, just so you know he’s speaking figuratively.
But, if you take the guy’s words seriously — and he certainly does, one naturally wonders if Nugent only tacks on the voting part because an editor makes him. Or as an act of self-preservation because he still has a hunch he’d be crossing a line of civilization he’d never be able to retreat back over if he didn’t.
Beset by paranoid conspiracy thinking, Nugent either parrots virtually everything that’s on Glenn Beck — a man who in the passing of a day continually links the Obama administration to Nazism and/or communism. Or in GOP memos issued for any given week.
But Beck is a much much larger force than Nugent, who as a commentator and pundit, exists only at the behest of Fox News, where he gets thrown scraps for being a colorful character.
I do know that at one time Nugent was a mainstream rock star in every sense of the word.
So in this man there is a radical reversal of fortune or ways and means in his life. And it coincidentally mirrors the decline of manufacturing and the growing desperation of the middle class.
To where now Nugent’s musical audience is almost exclusively non-payers from Paul Fussell’s bottom-out-of-sight demographic. And his bread-winning, aside from his live shows, is alms from the political audience where he’s a convenient carnival servant to the big celebrities from the extreme right.
Much more recently, like now, one sees Nugent as a a barnacle in the latest John Rich video.
Rich, of country megastar band Big & Rich, is now on a year or two long solo act kick, apparently so as not to have the psychedelic hippy, Big Kenny, always at his stage right.
And an article at Gibson guitars on Rich’s new song, “Country Done Come to Town,” is here. (The video is embedded here, too. By all means, watch it.)
It’s an amusing modern country tune and Nugent features prominently, well shot at angles minimizing his spreading middle third.
A vid about a power-drinking party hearty, Nugent takes his place as part of the festivities (which look like a beer endorsement), elbowing away from the bar in a move that looks just like what you’d expect from a thirsty shot drinker. Mr. Rage On About the Virtue of Teetotalism must have taken the day off.
The modern country audience — at least the imagery of it — is a natural one for Nugent. In fact, it was his audience in the late Seventies, in a harder form. But now Uncle Ted’s way up around the bend and the country music power structure is conservative in the sense that it won’t stomach too negative public politicking or abide the crazy and mean. With the latter only given dispensations for super freakishness in quick cut video or tucked away in hidden CD “bonus” cuts for purposes of hardy-har-har. (See Brad Paisley and Little Jimmy Dickens or anything involving Two Foot Fred.)
One sees Nugent’s plight pretty clearly.
He’s infamous but not as bankable as his musical talent deserved to make him. Nugent can be a spokesperson for Massey, the much vilified coal company, or a good ol’ boy with no lines in a straight-to-video Toby Keith movie, someone who gets fifteen minutes on Alex Jones, or be the star of a low budget reality show no one watched — where he injured his leg in a chainsaw misadventure.
There is a pathos to it, a description to which Nugent would probably strongly object.
The Toledo Blade ran an interview with Nugent over the weekend, another advance story stemming from his tour of third-tier concert venues this summer. But Nugent is nothing if not a gamer, more than willing to do his own publicity. And when he stifles old and crazy Ted for a few moments the results are often not bad:
Having marked his 6,000th concert in 2008, Nugent acknowledged in an interview by e-mail that he’s lost most of the hearing in his left ear from playing guitar in front of walls of speakers all those years, “and I limp pretty bad after double knee surgery due to the meniscus-smashing amplifier leaps for 40 years too. Ouch!” he said.
——
Nugent’s guitar and loin cloth have been on display in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, but despite The Nuge’s relentless touring and career sales of 30 million albums, the Motor City Madman has yet to be inducted into the hall.
“I often feel like an Indian up on the hill overlooking my sacred hunting grounds desecrated by white idiots,” he said.
“Political clowns” on the selection committee have disrespected rock pioneers — citing Hall of Fame inductees Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry as examples — by electing “anti-rockers like Patti Smith, ABBA, and Grandmaster Flash into the same institution. That is just plain rude,” he said.
On Sunday night, Nugent was playing a third tier dump in Oklahoma called Cain’s Ballroom. Cain’s was famous for being one of the venues the Sex Pistols played on their only tour of the US before breaking up.
Manager Malcolm McClaren purposely booked the band through the heart of redneck America, putting them in open combat with the locals. At the end of the tour in San Francisco, the band disintegrated.
The first of three YouTube videos show Nugent onstage at Cain’s on Sunday night. It’s as dire and claustrophobic as any video from the back of the crowd in a firetrap can be.
The next is a professional news clip of the Sex Pistols at Cain’s in 1978. Hang on for the reaction of the locals at the end.
Now you’re wondering, “Where was Ted in 1978?”
Headlining California Jam II. Punk rock had nothing on him.
Getting old is hard on everyone. Some manage it better than others.
This morning’s post by Digby was depressing but spot on, particularly if you grew up where DD did:
Maybe we need to realize that our old arguments about how Americans are so accustomed to living the good life that they would resist the natural consequence of this new feudalism aren’t going to work. This anti-tax fervor has passed out of the political realm and into the religious. When people would rather that their kids choke on dirt than pay taxes, I’m guessing that pointing out that their unwillingness to pay taxes will result in tainted meat and dangerous drugs won’t convince them. Living in a primitive state is a sign of their devotion.
For a hard core in Pine Grove, Pennsyltucky, in the late Sixties and early Seventies, this was exactly how they thought. However, better minds generally prevailed in the running of the state.
That’s not so any longer and it’s why the peoples of other western nations now laugh at the idea of America. They know that come the November elections, the United States government will — after a mercilessly brief period — go back to fast-tracking the less-than-half- of-the-country-delusion that being the biggest banana republic, ever, is great.
All because the president wasn’t quite strong enough.
Nugent railing with Alex Jones on premier paranoid whacko radio — condensed:
Four judges including two women on the Supreme Court are subhuman racist punks, the Obama administration is guilty of high treason, is Adolf Hitler, are wanna-be Joe Stalins, the government has secret papers or something that say if you have a photo of Ted Nugent in your house you’re a terrorist, the Mao ZeDong fan club is working for Barack Hussein Obama’s Indonesian dream, if there is a revolt and all Hell breaks loose Ted knows most of the military and police forces will side with ‘the people.’
In three parts, virtually unlistenable, I jumped on the grenade for you.
“I’ve written thousands of articles that no one can argue with on tednugent.com,” sez Ted. And “they” use the Saul Alinsky playbook to attack me, he adds.
Ted Nugent is educated, well-spoken and intelligent.
That’s if you discount the run-on sentences and the use of profanity as a crutch — something he used to never do. So about 0.5 out of three is still good, right?
The story informs Ted is prepping two new books — and selling a brand of coffee called Nuge Java. Something every bit as successful as Gonzo Meat Biltong.
Ted Nugent coffee, bound to wipe the floor with the sissy competition at Peet’s. He’s the next Newman’s Own brand. Uncle Ted — best dabbler at dabbling, ever.
Anyway:
Expected to soon join … other popular Nugent-scribed
books on store shelves are two more book projects, a coffee table
photo book glorifying outdoorsmanship, “Blood Brothers,” and a new
biographical tome, “Stranglehold: The Life Story of Ted
Nugent.”
Blog readers should consider getting a review copy of the latter when it hits stores. For DD. Imagine the riches of embarrassment I could find.
Which brings up another possibility.
DD writing an unauthorized biography of Ted Nugent as a study in American extremism.
And how the man went from being an arena-busting draw in late Seventies America — a guitar hero for the class that made stuff in factories — to a dried-up but furious extreme right pundit with a uniquely shriveled and mean viewpoint, a trajectory mirroring the decline of the nation’s reputation and vitality. A man who was one popular symbol for the old muscle of Detroit and Michigan. To someone who left the state for Waco, Texas, after being run off the bill of a big family-oriented summer concert series in 2003.
A rock ‘n’ roll Lyndon LaRouche.
Naturally, DD would not forget to analyze the Nuge’s loss of rock audience.
How did he get banished to playing third tier joints in Lake County, Indiana?
It’d be better than some propped-up Nugent-approved self-glorification, dontcha think?
Calling the Obama government the Mao ZeDong fan club? Check. Insist an African American member of the administration is a racist? Check. Advocate armed revolt? Check. Invocation of GOP whacko paranoid conspiracy theory that DoJ is suing Arizona to enslave illegals and get their votes? Check.
Excerpt:
Fedzilla is suing Arizona to show illegals in America that they have a friend in the District of Clowns. This, of course, is a sham. It is ultimately about getting their support and eventual votes and enslaving them by showering them with all kinds of Fedzilla pork-barrel programs, thereby stripping them of their work ethic and pride. Hey, it worked for many of my black fellow Americans, and we all know how well that has worked out.
If you weren’t some damn Godless commie liberal you wouldn’t think this is so funny!
On a tip from Rick in Pennsyltucky, this laugh out loud essay in the York Daily Record:
Last week, an alert reader called to point out an article in the Arizona Republic about Mexicans flocking to Pennsylvania, apparently hoping to alert the state that hordes of illegal immigrants will soon be overrunning the state and taking jobs from the thousands of Pennsylvanians who dream of, one day, trying to earn a living by picking fruit or mowing lawns.
I almost fell out of my chair. The columnist, Mike Argento, is already making a wry joke in the first graf, one satirically likening Pennsylvania to soCal. Which is actually where illegals fleeing Arizona come.
Argento goes on, at one point revealing:
A bill similar to the Arizona law is pending, introduced recently by some representative from Butler County. Rep. Daryl Metcalfe said, “The purpose of this legislation is to offer every illegal alien residing in Pennsylvania two options, leave immediately or go to jail.”
We’ve always been kinder and gentler here in Penn’s Woods.
The law has no chance of passing and has no chance of becoming law and has no chance of doing anything except elevate Metcalfe in the eyes of his constituents, which, being Butler County, are mostly deer and raccoons.
I guess word hasn’t gotten out about our attempt to join Arizona in hating on the Mexicans yet because nobody is boycotting Pennsylvania over the proposed law …
Tremendous column, you really should read all of it.
Understand that it will generate a certain amount of hate mail in the conservative ‘burg of York, PA.
Southern California has about 10 million people living in it. The entire state of Arizona, much less.
And Butler County, Pennsy, is a flyspeck. But one of those places from the interior which makes outsiders consider the state “like Alabama” between Pittsburgh and Philly (except for Dauphin County, also where African Americans live).
If you disagree with Ted Nugent’s politics, it’s tough to like him. That said, he’s by no means a stupid guy, and his charitable work for military veterans is without a doubt admirable. His opinions are generally well-articulated even if they do often include threats of violence against his critics. But therein lies the rub: Dude’s a fucking prick, and not in that likable-asshole kind of way. No, his general dickishness comes in the way of suggesting Iraq should have been nuked and his frequent suggestions that those occupying the opposite end of the political spectrum should “suck on my machine gun.??? Sure, there are plenty of attendees at a Ted Nugent concert who can’t wait for his inevitable mid-set tirade wherein me might fantasize murdering Hillary Clinton or threaten to shoot that commie Obama in his non-American face, but some of us just want to hear “Stranglehold.???
Such previews are proof it’s impossible to defame Nugent. He may complain loudly in columns that he’s been dubbed a race-baiter unjustly and that people better get their facts straight. But his own persona has created a substantial body of opinion that he is precisely what he says he is not.
In mid 2003 Nugent had a big gig lined up at the Muskegon Summer Celebration in Michigan. He then went on a radio show in Denver to do his inimitably Ted thing. The radio hosts pulled the plug on him.
The result — Nugent summarily dropped by the concert. Billboard, at the time:
“Derogatory racial remarks made by veteran rocker Ted Nugent have cost him a gig at the Muskegon Summer Celebration. Festival officials cancelled his concert following an interview last week with two Denver disc jockeys in which the DJs said he used slurs for Asians and blacks.”
Three months later Nugent sued the Muskegon concert officials for defamation. In his complaint, it was linked to a tortured argument about violation of his 14th Amendment rights and breach of contract, which had deprived him of an $80,000 guarantee.
The Billboard image/article is here in a parcel of articles and comes from the case files entered by Nugent’s legal team. (DD has more and may get to them in a future post.)
The lawsuit became a celebrity trial in Michigan during the course of which Nugent’s defamation claim was tossed out. Nugent eventually took the stand, saying the DJs had misinterpreted his use of the n-word in a conversation. Nugent said he had related a story about how an African American had told him, after watching him in performance: “If you keep playing … like that, you’re going to be an ‘n word’ when you grow up.”
Whether this was all Nugent said during the course of the radio appearance was not determined. No tape of it existed, apparently.
“Unmentioned at the trial were news accounts of Nugent’s use of the other words,” reported the Muskegon Chronicle in 2005.
Continued the newspaper:
Asked about it later by a Chronicle reporter, Nugent said he referred to “Jap guitars” in the context of a conversation about how some guitars are soulful, others not. Nugent said one of the disc jockeys then said the word “Jap” is offensive — a point Nugent disagrees with — and that he jokingly responded something to the effect of, “That’s not offensive. g—–‘ is offensive. [Apparently gooks.]
I didn’t call anybody a g—,” Nugent added.
Nugent claimed a subsequent Rocky Mountain News story about the radio interview — which generated a wire story that ran in The Muskegon Chronicle, launching the Muskegon uproar — was biased and false, although his own account of his on-air words resembled that given in the newspaper story.
By today’s Nuge-standard, it all reads rather mildly.
While the defamation part of the case was dismissed, Nugent was successful in his breach of contract suit. He was eventually paid his guarantee although Muskegon Summer Celebration lawyers had to prod him into admitting it had been settled.
What had and has been determined is that Nugent was a highly divisive character — and not in any good way, to paraphrase the Nashville Scene — someone always accompanied by maximum ugly controversy.
In a newspaper article after the trial’s conclusion, one read:
Shoppers at The Lakes Mall who had been following the case of rock star Ted Nugent and his lawsuit with the Muskegon Summer Celebration committee weren’t surprised by the outcome. A jury Thursday afternoon returned a quick verdict awarding Nugent … his breach-of-contract suit against the summer festival.
“I love Ted Nugent’s music. I understand Nugent has to be taken in context. Everybody don’t see it that way,” said Mike Elijah, 49, who is African-American and a fan of the festival.
“Most people see things as black and white,” Elijah said.
Elijah said he agreed with Summer Celebration’s decision not to allow Nugent to appear at the festival after allegations he made racial slurs during a live Denver radio show.
“Several teenagers asked for comment about the Nugent case were unable to do so without first receiving a briefing that Nugent was once a rock star,” added the newspaper.
A brief but amusing article on Wall Street parasites hedge fund guys and advice dispensers deals with their brand of US catastrophism — as opposed to the flavor found lower down the ladder in the extreme right middle class.
It’s still all about defending against the ravening hordes, the poor — those with color or tastes not like yours, coming for your pile. Buy precious metals and secure your self-sufficient farm getaway deep in the countryside. Be ready to fire a “boom stick” at interlopers.
“While there is no lack of survivalists stockpiling cat food and rifles, some of the direst thinkers are now working on Wall Street, where a combination of fear and foresight has many of the country’s money men contemplating their escape routes,” writes a columnist at AOL’s Daily Finance.
Wall Street catastrophists, of course, don’t see themselves as the villains in this play. It’s a view which puts them on the opposite side of the coin of the middle class white catastrophists, who generally view Wall Street with the same fear and loathing saved for Democrats and anyone of color.
There is an industry to cater to both classes of catastrophist. For the white paupers, there are the advertisements on Fox News — seemingly one every fifteen minutes — for the buying of gold with Gordon Liddy as patron saint. For more plans and tips, there are websites galore selling relatively cheap advice and the usual survivalism samizdat literature which has embroidered the fringes of American society for decades.
For Wall Street, the advice is more costly but about the same in terms of practical value. The column tells us drily:
Post Peak Living and Transition United States have both used dark visions to build a compelling business model that can convince the gullible and frightened to fork over cash for useless advice.
And the best quote, by far: “A fan of dark humor, [one doom predicter] previously advised spending stimulus cash on ‘prostitutes and beer, as these are the only products still produced in the U.S.'”
