Ted Nugent said:
“I have obviously failed to galvanize and prod, if not shame enough Americans to be ever vigilant not to let a Chicago communist-raised, communist-educated, communist-nurtured subhuman mongrel like the ACORN community organizer gangster Barack Hussein Obama to weasel his way into the top office of authority in the United States of America”.
How long is the NRA going to harbor this racist pig? It’s time for them to fire him and disassociate themselves from Nugent if they want to remain a viable organization. At what point does his behavior simply make the NRA a redneck organization?
Free speech be damned. He can say whatever he wants. At some point, however, the NRA is going to have to take ownership of his remarks as long as he sits on their board of directors. If I were the NRA and the NRA my parents used to belong to, I would want to at least try to sound like the voice of reason.
Additional offensive remarks by Nugent.
Nugent’s a troll. He always was. His lyrics always aimed to offend – with various levels of sexism and misogyny. His best known song “Strangehold” is quite disturbing – imagery of having a woman in a mental or physical “strangehold” and crushing her face. Then for decades he took pleasure offending the liberal rock community with talk of guns and hunting. Now he gets his kicks denigrating a President he doesn’t like. The guy’s a clown.
Like Charlie Daniels, he’s a has-been who has propped his career up by playing towards conservatives. When they speak, usually something inane comes out.
When you’re right, you’re right. Can the NRA have a spoesperson who calls the President a “subhuman mongrel”?
Here’s who we’re dealing with : “In 1978, Nugent began a relationship with seventeen-year-old Hawaii native Pele Massa. Due to the age difference they could not marry so Nugent joined Massa’s parents in signing documents to make himself her legal guardian, an arrangement that Spin magazine ranked in October 2000 as #63 on their list of the “100 Sleaziest Moments in Rock””
I wouldn’t call him sub-human.
And I’m as much a mongrel as he is.
He’s a grumpy old man and an animal. He is also a coward who dodged the Vietnam draft by defecating himself in front of his draft board. Truthfully, I’m glad he never soiled our uniform. I wish he would make good on his threat to be dead or in jail if Obama were reelected.
Ewwww for real? He is an even bigger pig than I thought. The NRA has to know that his stench rubs off on them.
The “mongrel” reference thrown at our President has a certain nostalgic resonance to it. Of course, not many of us could refute a charge that we are a mixture of many different strains. But, in this context, it lights up a bit of Proustian remembrance for a former Chancellor of the Third Reich who dismissed the role of America in world affairs (and the Chancellor’s vision) by describing us as a mongrel nation.
I think that many Europeans find our mongrelness strange. I find being all of anything sort of incestuous, to be honest.
Get your facts straight, Starryflights. He didn’t say he defecated in front of the local draft board. He did it in his clothes all during the week before his appearance so, when he stood before the board, he smelled like a bum living in a toilet bowl. Big deal. You think he was the only one? All kinds of people, liberals especially, did anything to get out of the draft, including running off to Canada and almost ruining the rest of their lives until the Carter reprieve. Many guys got thoroughly snockered the night before so their BP would register over the military limits. I don’t drink. But, when my own BP did register a bit high, the army medic accused me of spending the night on the bottle. So he decided to pass me anyway because he was apparently tired of all the shenanigans he had to put up with by the “cowards” trying to escape the draft. I came home from Nam on an evac plane full of mangled Marines. The guy next to me was covered from head to toe in a cast and moaned in pain all the way to the States. These were guys who would have died in previous wars but whose shattered lives were saved only by the work and skills of George Harris and others in the medical services. Could be that you yourself, had you been young in that era, would have crapped on yourself to escape going to Nam.
I hope the NRA keeps him forever. He’s just about as perfect a face for that group as you could get. He just so cultured and scholarly.
So non liberal dodgers are okay?
@Wolverine
We now know that he spews xxxx [crap] from both ends.
[word redacted. Trigger word]
@Wolverine
I believe that Starry is a vet. He may tell us if he is not but I seem to recall him telling us he was. I also know that if he is a vet, he volunteered because he isn’t old enough to have been drafted.
Now, having said that, I am extremely offended that you would say “liberals especially.” Opposing the war in Vietnam doesn’t make one a liberal and I expect that liberals and conservatives alike wanted to not be drafted into a war in a foreign country that had nothing to do with the defense of the United States of America.
I also am going to say that those who went to Canada did not necessarily ruin their lives. There are communities on Vancouver Island still of people who went to Canada. I don’t think their lives are ruined. They looked pretty happy to me.
For the record, I wasn’t a flower child hippy commie puke or whatever they were called. I was engaged to a marine vet. Didn’t end up marrying him but I spent some quality years there. He volunteered. Came back in one piece. We actually met after he got back.
The liberal jab was uncalled for and inaccurate. Most kids didn’t want to be drafted to go fight someone else’s war. The young south Vietnamese folks of Saigon were riding around on mopeds and our boys were doing their dirty work for a while. Cowards? I don’t think so.
I don’t bear a guy ill will for dodging the draft.
But when they spend the rest of their adult lives denigrating other people to try to prop up their image of their manhood – like Nugent, like Limbaugh – I do bear some ill will for that.
I agree with you 100% on that one, Rick. If they just went off and minded their own business, I would be fine with it. But they don’t.
They also aren’t paragons of family values either…but demonize others.
Blogs are interesting because of the anonymity – my personal Viet Nam experience was my 19 year old neighbor Johnny B was killed in action about a month after going. I was about 16 and was inconsolable for weeks and so sad for many years after that. He was a BIG deal in our small town and always made a big deal when he would pass me in the hall at school or in public. Barely a week goes by that I don’t think of him even now.
No one here should try and claim the corner on all events or situations. Because of our anonymity it’s pointless. It becomes tiresome to see some insisting on claiming to have the most moral outrage all the time. Johnny B wasn’t old enough to know if he was a liberal or a conservative. He didn’t join to be able to go to college. He was drafted and obeyed.
Nugent disgusts me – he has life and chooses to be unpleasant and negative. I wish my friend was living in Canada.
Thank you for sharing something so deeply personal. I still tear up over Charlie M. He was drafted also. Not a liberal or a conservative. Just a kid. Most of the names on that wall are kids.
Moon — You had better understand that, with me, accusing someone of being a coward for avoiding the draft in the Nam era is a third rail. The draft in that era was a real pressure and life disruption only those who experienced it can feel. The war was unpopular and the object of frequent and sometimes out-of-control demonstrations. Returning troops were called baby killers and treated like crap, even if they had gone only because they had to go. Nobody would say whether we were really trying to win the war or not. ( Boy, did I run into that in Nam on that joke of a DMZ where the North Vietnamese sappers and gunners roamed at will.) Who wants to die or live mangled the rest of your life for that kind of war?
I don’t care if Starryflights was in the service or not. There were thousands upon thousands of kids who were trying anything to escape the SSS. It really ticks me off to hear some modern day lib call conservatives who got out of the Vietnam draft “cowards” when many, many of those trying the same thing sounded just like him in their politics. (And, Moon, don’t you try to tell me different. I was released from active duty long before the war ended and spent the next few years in grad school on a campus inflamed wth anti-war sentiment.) They even tried that bs in 2012 with Romney.
Let me tell you one thing. I have been through a lot of tough scrapes in my life and career. But I never felt so helpless in my life as I did on that medevac plane next to that kid. All I could see was his eyes, nostrils, and mouth. The rest of him was all covered with a white cast. I had to imagine how his body looked under that cast and what kind of life he would ever have after that. He moaned with pain all the time. Apparently it was all he could voice. The USAF medevac nurse tried to comfort him, but it seemed like a hopeless task. I wanted to help that kid somehow and I could not, feeling like I could not break the chains of helplessness. That was all the way from Japan to Washington, DC. I never saw the kid again. I don’t know whether he lived or even wanted to live. I just ask that people back off the contemporary business about who was a coward and who wasn’t because they got out of the Nam draft. Those who did go were not exactly treated as heroes as opposed to “cowards” who didn’t go. In fact, those who went were often called dumb because they couldn’t figure a way to get out of that terrible war. Enough of the contemporary crap.
Afraid you aren’t going to hear contemporary crap from me. It’s later in the day and I don’t remember what the argument is even over. No, I couldn’t be drafted because of my gender. I guess I was the lucky one. You can pull rank on me on that one. However, I was around for the at home fireworks and I have a problem with anyone being called a coward. Most of those kids were just kids. they weren’t liberals or conservatives. they just didn’t want to go to Vietnam and I don’t blame them.
My friend did. I have no idea why. He wanted to be a Marine and thought Chesty Puller could do no wrong.
I don’t think most returning vets were treated horribly. I think conditions in VA hospitals were deplorable. Are they much better now? How long to people wait for services? Most of the people I knew were ignored. I only know one person who was spat upon. I think he went through San Francisco…but around here that just didn’t happen.
I don’t think any of us who came along during those times came through without some ambivalent feelings. I know I have very mixed emotions on many topics during the 60s and early 70s.
@Wolverine
My husband, his father, and his brother (a medic) went to Vietnam. No one they know or I know was called a baby-killer. My husband doesn’t remember anyone discussing politics while he was there. Many vets became involved in politics after returning and being discharges though. A few of my fellow workers went back to grad school and became involved at that hotbed of liberalism, GWU, after they were discharged. One is still actively involved in a Vietnam vets organization. Other guys I knew tried the conscientious objector route – one successfully. Most were just kids who were drafted or knew they would be. Many became flaming liberals afterward. They’re entitled to their opinions. One of my best friends was a nurse who went to Vietnam when her husband, a doctor, did. She came back rabidly pro-war and conservative. He came back anti-war and a liberal. They’re still married so i guess they can tolerate disparate opinions.
Oopsy. That’s my post – Censored’s – instead of BS’s.
[I fixed it! M-H]
BSinVA — I didn’t say we discussed politics much when we were there — except for that Marine who brazenly wore a peace symbol on the front of his helmet. Nor did I say the vets were flaming radicals after they came home — although some were. I was talking about young people of draft age on campus who were anti-war, sometimes violently so, and who desperately did not want to be drafted. By happenstance or out of curiosity, I sat through a lot of rabid pro-Cuba and nutcake pro-Communist student-sponsored meetings and gatherings. I didn’t know whether to laugh or puke. And, by Gosh, I even got to listen to the late I.F. Stone, of all people.
My medevac journey ended, they brought us to the hospital in ambulances with big side windows. All the people on the road could see what war does to their kids. We must have looked like a shipment of Egyptian mummies. They carried us into the hospital on litters and put us on the floor of the receiving room. All kinds of us. Some blind. Some without legs or arms. Some with terrible burns. Some still just plain out of it, as the medical personnel circled among them to see to immediate needs. Then a senior officer got up in front and welcomed us home, trying some levity by telling us the day’s baseball scores. Then his face got very sober. He told us that, when we got ambulatory and were deemed ready to go out on leave or liberty, we should not wear our uniforms. Wear only civilian clothes, he warned. That way you may be able to avoid getting insulted and spit on in the streets and goaded into fistfights by those who hate the military because of the war. When he said that, I looked around at the bodies and the bandages and casts and where missing limbs should have been and thought: “My Lord, these kids answered the call and have given so much that their lives may never be the same, and now they are warned that, by wearing the uniform of their country, they are inviting some kind of anatagonism toward themselves from their own fellow citizens.” When I became ambulatory and able to go out of the hospital, I never wore my uniform and war ribbons except to travel. To this day I am ashamed of myself for giving in to that. Your family may have different stories, but that is mine.
I think it depends on where you were. Virginia and the rest of the south has a long history of military tradition. I never knew any of that nonsense to happen around here. No one should have been subjected to anything and shame on the few that did dish out anything other than courtesy.
I opposed the Iraq War. It had nothing to do with those who fought in it. That was their job. They didn’t set the rules. It would have never occurred to me to be anything but respectful to those who served.
Btw, did you ever see it happen to anyone? I am not sure that the senior military officer wasn’t just full of it.
We have all heard the story of troops being called names and being spat on. I only know one person who said it happened to him and I am not sure he is telling the truth.
@Wolverine
You have to admit that the govt sure fed us all a line of crap about that War. They lied about objective, the enemy, and what would happen if we lost.
As far as I am concerned, we have 55 thousand lives up on that wall whose lives were snuffed out in vain.
Forrest Gump.
Wolverine mentioned a couple of times whether those who were wounded wanted to live or die, I surely don’t know but you might want to ask some of these guys:
http://www.woundedwarriorproject.org/mission/meet-a-warrior.aspx
whether they would rather be dead or alive. One warrior who comes to mind is Anthony Villarreal. Don’t take a look at him if you are not prepared to be shocked.
As I have written in the past, the hardest to do is to see the light go out of someone’s eyes and that someone is a young person 18, 19, or perhaps 20 years old. Medical folks work very hard to save these wounded souls, but there sometimes is only so much you can do. One time in the OR, I watched an orthopedic surgeon try to save a young Marine’s feet that were mangled by what we now call an IED. He must have put 15 or 20 Steinmann pins in this young man’s feet in an attempt to save them. Suddenly he stopped, sat down on a stool and began to cry, saying, “I just can’t save his feet, there is no way, I have to take them off.” I don’t know where that man is today but if he is still around, I suspect he would thank that doctor for saving his life.
Old men send young men, and now young women, to fight wars. It seems that it has always been that way. Perhaps if we send the old men to fight, wars wouldn’t last as long or be as fierce.
Finally, I went, I came home, I wore my uniform and was never spat on or called a baby killer. And if I knew the senior officer whole told those wounded warriors they shouldn’t wear their uniform, I would kick his ass. P.S. I was a liberal before I went and I am still a liberal who hates war with a passion. I have seen the results. I have had the blood of warriors on my hands. There is nothing pretty about war.
As for Nugent–he lives by people paying attention to him. Don’t pay attention–he shrivels up and dies.
Very eloguent, George. You, of all people here, certainly have the street cred to address this issue.
Look, I cry over the Civil War. Why on earth would perfectly reasonable young men, some as young as 13 or 14 go out and stand in a line and shoot at an enemy who you share a country with. What a horrible horrible war. Stupid Stupid Stupid. I can’t even get pat that one.
George, thanks for your service and for doing your best to save lives.
Moon — To respond to your question about me: No, I was not accosted myself, but then I did not wear my uniform on liberty. My post-hospital assignment was to a through and through Navy town and on a very large and secure base.
However, I have asked Mrs. W again, who was for a number of years a Navy Nurse in that same hospital. She took care of those wounded Marines….and me. She tells me that the warning not to wear your uniform off base was most certainly policy and for good reason, in her opinion. She recalls that some of the returning Marines, once ambulatory and on liberty call, did get confronted on the streets, yelled at, spit at, and goaded into fights. Those guys had a lot of pride in the Corps and their service. Tempers could be short. The command did not want to see them risk such situations, hence the warning about uniforms. Mrs. W says she knows first hand that the whole thing, including the business of not wearing your uniform, was a real psychological downer for some of them. The hospital was located in one of our largest cities. The hospital no longer exists.
Thanks, George. That’s how I felt when that senior officer gave his warning…..until I found that he was very serious. It was specific time and place for us.
You are probaby right about wanting to live, George. I never dared ask any of them. It was probably my response to their situations more than most of them. I do know that there was often great joy among those who found out that they could walk again, and even dance, with artificial limbs. But one story has never left me. One of Mrs. W’s patients had been horribly burned on the head and face. He would need much corrective surgery. One day he looked at Mrs. W and blurted out: “Ma’am, do you think my girl will ever love me again?!! Mrs. W says it near broke her heart.
Wounded Warriors. Give as much as you can.
I think too many vets who have been physically or emotionally harmed are often out of sight and out of mind to the American people. We don’t think about this damage when we are all out flag waving for the cause du jour.
Thanks to everyone here who served, for their service.
Sadly there is a chunk of our population that thrive on the crap that Nugent puts out. They’re the race baiters, race haters who crawl out from rocks when guys like Nugent come around. They are from the shallow, slimy end of the gene pool.
I don’t disagree, George.