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.

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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.