Ted Nugent at the Gov. Rick Perry's inaugural ball.
(Via YouTube)
Mark Howard at News Corpse
got it exactly right. Right-wing psycho Ted Nugent's grotesque rant at the National Rifle Association conference in St. Louis this past weekend ran "the gamut from merely disrespectful to hostile to treasonous." But then his remarks were only slightly more outrageous than those that long-time NRA CEO Wayne La Pierre
has been spouting. The question is, just as it was back at the beginning of March when Nugent
had a phone call with Mitt Romney about endorsing him, will the candidate embrace this bilge or distance himself from it? Yes, that's rhetorical.
Among Nugent's choicest comments:
• "We've got four Supreme Court justices who don't believe in the constitution."
• "If Barack Obama becomes the President in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year."
• "We need to ride into the battlefield and chop their heads of in November."
• "It's as Nazi Germany as it gets."
Riiiiight. And Nugent wants to convince us he's targeted for a trip to a death camp.
As Howard asks, where are the media on this? The mild remarks of Hilary Rosen get transformed into an icon of Democratic indifference to the needs of "real women" while the vile, eliminationist rhetoric of Nugent, who claims he got a personal vow from Romney before giving his endorsement last month, goes mostly unmentioned.
Nugent's, and the NRA's, bogus claims regarding the supposed efforts of the Obama administration and four members of the Supreme Court to attack the 2nd Amendment might be chalked up to mere campaign-year hyperbole. Just the stuff that helps sell more firearms and charges up that segment of American gun-owners who, because they are either lunatics or badly informed or both, are paranoid about their weapons being confiscated.
In fact, gun laws in America are, right now, as loose as they've been in the modern era. If you aren't a convicted felon, certified as mentally ill or proven to be addicted to drugs, you can legally buy a firearm in every state. In 42 states, and in many counties of all but a couple of the remaining states, you can obtain a permit to carry a concealed firearm with just about zero hassle. Most of them have reciprocal arrangements with each other so that a concealed permit issued in, say, Utah, is recognized as valid in, say, Florida. And yet Ted Nugent and Wayne La Pierre keep spouting their spew, rarely being challenged on it by media or politicians who the NRA has, after years of diligent efforts, manage to cow into keeping their lips zipped on the subject.
No matter how far out they go with their pronouncements, Mitt Romney certainly won't challenge them. Gotta keep the paranoid brigade in his camp even if its ranks are filled with people who trust him only a smidgen more than they trust Obama.
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11:05 AM PT: While Nugent's words about being dead or in jail are not clear—was that an assassinate-the-President reference or some claim by Nugent that he's so important he will be targeted by the administration in a second term?—some folks have taken notice: A spokesman for the Secret Service tells us, "We are aware of it, and we'll conduct an appropriate follow up."