Tuesday, April 17, 2012

HEY, AT LEAST HE DIDN'T SAY ANYTHING ABOUT STAY-AT-HOME MOMS

So ... how will the media manage to make this less of a story than "Rosen-gate"? Because you know it's going to be a dead story in far fewer news cycles than the Hilary Rosen story was:

Rocker and noted gun enthusiast Ted Nugent is stirring up attention over comments he made about President Obama and his administration at a National Rifle Association conference in St. Louis over the weekend.

As the website Right Wing Watch reports, Nugent called Obama a criminal and denounced his "vile, evil, America-hating administration" which is "wiping its ass with the Constitution."

He went on to say, "If Barack Obama becomes the President in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year." Nugent ... has already endorsed Mitt Romney for president....

New York magazine's Daily Intel blog reports that a Secret Service spokesman told them, "We are aware of it and we'll conduct an appropriate follow up" regarding Nugent's comments.

Nugent also ripped into four of the Supreme Court justices for what he says is their stance against Americans' "right to keep and bear arms." He concluded with a call to cut off the heads of Democrats in November: "We need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November. Any questions?" ...


What's the excuse going to be for not hanging this around the Romney campaign's neck the way Hilary Rosen's remarks about Ann Romney were hung around the Obama campaign's? Is the media suddenly going to change the rules and say Bill Maher was right, we should all stop expressing outrage and apologizing? Is Nugent going to be declared irrelevant because, heck, he's just an entertainer (even though he's an entertainer whose endorsement the Romney campaign actively sought, and even though he's been embraced by GOP presidential aspirants and other high-ranking politicians, including the current governors of Texas and Michigan and a certain former governor of Alaska)?

You know this is going to be a one-news-cycle story at worst. I think that's because the media believes that gun owners are just too darn salt-of-the-earth to be held to decent standards of behavior. Same for hardcore Republicans in general: if you don't put on a sheet or use the N-word in e-mails, you're golden. Say what you want. Threaten whatever Democrat you choose. Say, for instance, that Bill Clinton "Better have a bodyguard" if he dares to venture below the Mason-Dixon Line. Go ahead. You're the football captains in this high school cafeteria. You've got carte blanche.

****

I will say this: I speak pretty fluent wingnut, and I don't think the money quote in all this -- "If Barack Obama becomes the president in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year" -- means "If Barack Obama becomes the president in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year because I'll have assassinated him." I hear it as a narcissistic version of the paranoid but universally accepted belief among gun nuts that Obama will take away everyone's guns as as soon as he's reelected. Nugent is claiming to be such a dangerous enemy of Barack Gun-Grabber that, immediately after Election Day, when Obama's real agenda emerges, Nugent will simply have to be silenced.

To me, Nugent also squeaks by with that "chop their heads off" remark because he tacks on "in November." And you can make your own judgment about another statement he made at that event, which isn't in the main clip most people have watched but was part of the same event:

It isn't the enemy that ruined America. It's good people who bent over and let the enemy in.

If the coyote's in your living room pissing on your couch, it's not the coyote's fault. It's your fault for not shooting him.


I don't think Nugent wants to kill Obama (or Eric Holder or Hillary Clinton the Supreme Court justices who were appointed by Democrats, all of whom he thinks are "evil"). I don't think he wants anyone else to kill those people. I think he wants what the gun lobby always has: absolute political power whenever it chooses to exercise it. You dare to cross us? We destroy you at the polls. So don't even try it.

Perhaps I say that because I don't want Nugent in jail a year from now. I wouldn't want to give him the satisfaction.

I just want him to be a political pariah for the rest of his life, and to make every politician who's ever shrugged off his years and years of moral repulsiveness a political pariah. But that's largely up to the press, so I'm not holding my breath.

6 comments:

  1. Aw heck, I've no objection to Ted getting what he predicts, myself - and either jail or the life eternal would be OK. Just another reason to pull for re-election.

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  2. Anonymous5:37 AM

    The NRA used to be about gun safety. Gun rights were a side issue.

    Now guns are just a smokescreen for the most completely crackpot neo-Bircherism imaginable.

    Obama’s theory of the 2nd Amendment is the NRA’s own and was that before the Supremes adopted it and made it official dogma. There is no serious gun issue standing between the NRA and Obama.

    But the NRA just isn’t really about guns, any more. That’s just another smokescreen behind which hide the by now usual gaggle of right wing lunatics.

    Rich, powerful, and demented.

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  3. In spite of all the scare-mongering by the whiny-ass titty-babies on the right, the Obama years have been a golden era of lax gun laws.

    As a failed rocker, I see the John Lennon connection.

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  4. Hello No More Mr. Nice Blog,
    I am with Gaius Sempronius Gracchus on this, (by the way love the name as it shows intelligence of even knowing who he was) and see the NRA trying to make an argument where there is none. Made up fear mongering! I have always been raised that with gun ownership, comes with gun responsibility, and Ted is not showing much of that here of late. Before this statement, Ted made the statement that he wanted the President to suck on the barrel of his machine gun while he pulled the trigger. Gee...What an enlightened lad he must be.

    All those years of LSD abuse in the late 1960’s did take its toll on little Teddy Nugent when he was with Amboy Dukes and they were promoting LSD usage with their hit song, “Journey to the Center of the Mind.”

    Soooo now he is promoting “Killing the President of the United States.” Why does anyone give this “Old Drugged Out Hippy” any credibility of now being a Conservative? I think that it would be more descriptive to refer to him as a “Crispy Conservative!”

    Aww…. now I have the munchies from his contact buzz.

    To conclude, I am saving your site to my favorites and will check in with you often. Keep up the good work.

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  5. I don't think that Obama's interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is the same as La Pierre's and the NRA. Any sane interpretation understands the word militia; but Obama as the rest of us are lying low about this truth because we cannot win against the NRA. We talk about it only to others we know and trust and hope (knock wood) that we will not be one of the hundred innocents killed each year by someone with a gun. On fear they have won.

    ReplyDelete