You probably already know that Ted Nugent attacked the John Roberts health care decision in an op-ed for The Washington Times, in which Nugent wrote this:
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.Wow -- is that racist?
I'm sure you think so. Ahhh, but you're wrong, for one surprising reason:
Ted Nugent is black!
Don't believe me? Just ask him!
Moderator:I gather there's more along those lines in this video, but it's been taken down, alas.
Do you believe the Republican Party is trying to be inclusive? Do you believe it should?
Ted Nugent:
Absolutely, absolutely! They have accepted Ted Nugent — what more do you want? I'm a huge, crazed black man from Detroit — they love me!
--from an ABC News live chat held at the time of the 2000 Republican convention
*****
"I am the funniest black man in America since Richard Pryor caught on fire."
--from a 2010 interview
*****
"Tell Larry The Cable Guy I'm the funniest black man around."
--Nugent to standup comic PJ Walsh, as quoted on Walsh's Facebook page
He also called himself "a black Jew at a Nazi-Klan rally" after he was criticized (and contacted by the Secret Service) for recent inflammatory anti-Obama remarks.
So see? He wouldn't have derived racial benefit from a Southern victory in the Civil War! He's African-American!
Or so he keeps telling us, rather obsessively.
TN may, for all I know, be a devoted Klansman, but in the present case I think you mistake his target and his point.
ReplyDeleteHis personal target is Roberts, not Obama, whom he is well aware voted against the judge’s confirmation.
His legislative target is the ACA and his broader political target is the federal power that sustains every progressive achievement since the beginning of the 20th Century.
Hence the yelling about the 10th Amendment and also hence the shout about Confederate victory that, I think, had nothing to do with slavery or race.
Here is why I think that.
When the Southern states seceded they formed a union of their own, the Confederate States of America, with a constitution of its own that was modeled on that of the United States.
But it differed by containing some provisions explicitly limiting the power of the federal government of the CSA in some of the ways conservatives alone insist the constitution of the United States also limits the federal government of the USA.
Ways that neo-confederates say exclude Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and pretty much everything done in the 20th Century in the name of the progressive agenda over cries of conservatives that all of it was unconstitutional from the start.
As for my own opinion, of course I think the conservatives are wrong about the US constitution.
And I think they may be wrong, at least in part, about the CSA constitution, as well.
And in either case I care a whole lot less about what a collection of racist, sexist, oligarchical slavocrats meant in or wanted from the constitution they wrote and we today never even got to vote on than any conservative alive.
Anyway, that was how I took his wild rant, full of hysteria and lies as it was, at the Washington Times.
IMHO.
What Joseph said.
ReplyDeleteOr, he's one of this nation's biggest assholes.
My money's on that.
I know what he was getting at. I know he was waxing nostalgic for the Confederacy in a states'-rights-y sort of way.
ReplyDeleteI also know that saying the Civil War was all about states' rights is the first refuge of a racist scumbag.
So I'm ignoring his stated premise.
You know, we DID try the Articles of Confederation before we realized we needed more cohesion and structure and came up with the federal Constitution...In Order to Form a More Perfect Union and all that jazz.
ReplyDeleteSo it wasn't like a state's rights free-for-all wasn't a tested idea. The Southern States either weren't paying attention the first time around, or had some overwhelmingly compelling mutual interest that they needed to preserve. Something economic perhaps, that they all had in common. Hmmm....what COULD that be?
The Confederacy learned the hard way that a constitution that is very pro State's Rights has some severe limitations. Towards the end of the war many of the southern states started just ignoring calls from Richmond for more troops and supplies for the front. They began pulling back to just worry about the state over the CSA as a whole.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Steve that Nugent's comments were just the usual State's Rights claptrap. And those that use that rallying cry generally don't even think about the slavery aspect of the CSA. They just see it as some lost State's Rights utopia. Typical myopic, revisionist blather.
Erik
http://eaprince.blogspot.com
Ted Nugent is my number one source for political wisdom.
ReplyDelete