Skip to main content

You Are Who You Embrace

By

The Man who mistook the President for a chair
The GOP has had a bit of a "celebrity" problem over the years.  Clint Eastwood seemed like a sure bet at the Republican National Convention, but when he decided to carry on a conservation with a chair which he mistook for Obama this became a running gag on the late night television circuit.  Then came this motley selection of musicians to sing America the Beautiful with Mitt Romney on the campaign trail, which didn't come off very well either.

However, none can compare with Ted Nugent, who seems to be everywhere on the campaign trail these days, spouting off whatever comes to the top of his head and damn the consequences.  His latest act was calling the President a "subhuman mongrel," while stumping for Texas gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott.  This led to rebukes from Rand Paul and Rick Perry, who are definitely no friends of Obama.  The Nuge was forced to apologize, "but on behalf of much better men than myself," which one assumes is Paul and Perry, as he seemed to leave Obama out of this rather vague act of contrition.

The Nuge and Wheels (aka Greg Abbott) at a gun shop
This led many to ponder why the GOP would even embrace a guy like Nugent, who is not exactly a pillar of conservative values.  All he seems to share with radical Republicans is a love for guns and a hatred for Obama.  The most recent Nuge revelation came from Courtney Love who claimed she gave Ted a blow job when she was 12 years old.  While such accusations would bring most politicians down, this only seems to add to the aura that surrounds Ted Nugent, an unrepentant hard rocker and Libertarian who appears to serve as the GOP stand-in for Hunter S. Thompson.

The major difference is that Democrats tended to shy away from Dr. Gonzo, especially in his latter years when his hard living caught up with him.  By contrast, the Republicans went so far as to invite the Nuge, along with Willie Robertson of the Duck Dynasty (pictured below with Paul Ryan), to the President's State of the Union address.  It would seem that despite the concerns, the GOP is willing to embrace such persons and take advantage of their "celebrity" status on the campaign trail.

Of Ducks and Men
Now, I imagine this works just fine in East Texas and the bayous of Louisiana, but one has to ask do you want these guys around for the next national convention?  One would think the GOP learned from Clint Eastwood's little talk with a chair that these celebrities can't always be counted upon at national events.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more