Tony Alva and I don't agree on all that much in the political spectrum, but we do concur on one key point: the world needs less of people like the lunatic former rock star Ted Nugent. The foolish editors at CNN.com, in their immature journalistic twitch to recruit a pro-gun voice to "balance" the anti-gun outcry post-Blacksburg, turned to the hateful 59-year-old machine-gun loving bully with the fake front teeth. Given the platform of millions of web visitors, he "balanced" our national dialogue thusly:
Zero tolerance, huh? Gun-free zones, huh? Try this on for size: Columbine gun-free zone, New York City pizza shop gun-free zone, Luby's Cafeteria gun-free zone, Amish school in Pennsylvania gun-free zone and now Virginia Tech gun-free zone.
Anybody see what the evil Brady Campaign and other anti-gun cults have created? I personally have zero tolerance for evil and denial. And America had best wake up real fast that the brain-dead celebration of unarmed helplessness will get you killed every time, and I've about had enough of it.
The once-poetic crooner of such lyrical megahits as Wang Dang Sweet Poontang has now inherited the national Charlton Heston mantle of surly manchild clutching a deadly weapon in gnarled old fingers whilst grinning like a maniac. (He serves as a national board member of the NRA). It's an important position in national politics, where a swath of the electorate reads the frontier-inspired 18th century Second Amendment with a literalism that rivals their parallel interpretation of the book of Genesis.
Of course, the one time the U.S. government tried to put a rifle in ole Teddy's hands, he quickly enrolled in a community college and took a student deferment. This was back in the late 60s, when Nugent was a young guitar-player out of Detroit. He never made the rice paddies of Vietnam, but he did brag to the Detroit Free Press: “... if I would have gone over there, I’d have been killed, or I’d have killed all the Hippies in the foxholes. I would have killed everybody.”
This compelling American patriot he did turn up later as George Bush's ranching neighbor down in Texas, where attitudes towards a man's massive personal cache of deadly weapons is far more - uh - liberal than in suburban Michigan. In fact, Nugent has criticized President Bush for his strategy in Iraq: ""Our failure has been not to Nagasaki them."
The Nugent ranch is a fenced zoological park with all sort of "wild" species that the owner hunts down and kills for "sport." Nugent bragged to Salon that he attains:
"a full predator spiritual erection" from pursuing "bear, lions, coons, housecats, escaped chimps, small children, scared women, and everything else that can be chased and/or hunted."
Catch the violent sexual reference there to women and children, folks? Yet this guy is the celebrity front-man to the pro-gun movement - a very successful political drive to smack down increased regulation of deadly weapons in this country. A movement that all of the Republican candidates for President rushed to embrace before the bodies of Virginia Tech were even cold. Short version: "Terrible tragedy, prayers etc., don't touch the Second Amendment." This was before the candlelight vigils, before the funerals, before the last victim was even removed to the morgue.
Susan Grant is the executive vice president of CNN News Services, which runs CNN.com - the buck for allowing a maniac hater like Ted Nugent a national platform in the wake of Blacksburg stops with her. David Payne is senior vice president and general manager of CNN.com. The executive producer of CNN.com is Mitch Gelman, who once won a Pulitzer for reporting with Newsday. Remember the names - Susan Grant, David Payne, Mitch Gelman, and Ted Nugent - the four horse's asses of the apocalypse. People who promote reason like this in the interest of "discourse":
Already spineless gun control advocates are squawking like chickens with their tiny-brained heads chopped off, making political hay over this most recent, devastating Virginia Tech massacre, when in fact it is their own forced gun-free zone policy that enabled the unchallenged methodical murder of 32 people.
Thirty-two people dead on a U.S. college campus pursuing their American Dream, mowed-down over an extended period of time by a lone, non-American gunman in possession of a firearm on campus in defiance of a zero-tolerance gun ban. Feel better yet? Didn't think so.
Ol' Nuge is right about one thing. We don't feel better yet. Well done, CNN.
