Wang Dang Sweet Da Nang Poontang

Via MaxSpeak it seems that Ted Nugent has gotten the urge to open his piehole for no good reason at all. I, for one, am shocked.

Speaking at the NRA's annual convention Saturday, Nugent said each NRA member should try to enroll 10 new members over the next year and associate only with other members.

"Let's next year sit here and say, 'Holy smokes, the NRA has 40 million members now,'" he said. "No one is allowed at our barbecues unless they are an NRA member. Do that in your life."

Now, I'm a big believer in the Second Amendment. I do not own a gun, primarily because we have a small child and my wife is petrified of guns. I do not have enough gun-lust in my heart to make it worth my while to try to convince my wife that she is a wuss, or something inane like that. It is simply a matter of mutual respect.

Nevertheless, I have a fair amount of experience with firearms, including assault weapons, and most of my friends own at least one gun. All are very responsible owners. Some may or may not even be NRA members. It has never even occurred to me to ask.

And that is exactly the problem with Nugent's polemic nonsense, the idea that people congregate around this specific commonality. Gun owners/NRA members have barbecues with non-gun owners/non-NRA members all the time, one would think. Has anyone ever asked you at a barbecue, "Hey, Clem, you in the NRA? 'Cause ya know if ya ain't, I gots to get all Deliverance on ya. Yeeee-hawww!"? I didn't think so.

The same dynamic seems to work with most of the cultural defensive postures, the people who know they're trying to turn back an inexorable tide, but they do nonetheless, for whatever reason. Homosexuality is probably the biggest elephant in that room; it doesn't seem to occur to these yahoos that homosexuals don't define themselves by the hole they plug any more than straight people do.

Anyway....Nugent apparently once said re his no-show in Nam, despite his he-man tough-guy act:

"He claims that 30 days before his draft board physical, he stopped all forms of personal hygiene. The last 10 days, he ingested nothing but Vienna sausages and Pepsi; and a week before his physical, he stopped using bathrooms altogether, virtually living inside pants caked with his own excrement, stained by his urine. That spectacle won Nugent a deferment, he says. ‘... but if I would have gone over there, I'd have been killed, or I'd have killed, or I'd killed all the hippies in the foxholes...I would have killed everybody.’"

And you thought Bush's and Cheney's dodges were pathetic. Jeezus, you'd think that such a person would have enough sense to keep his yap shut for the rest of his life on matters of war.

So let's get all that straight -- when it comes to hunting animals, Terrible Ted is all about getting out there with a gun or a bow and arrow, ready to lay waste to many a peaceful ruminant. When it comes to the world's most dangerous game, or when his country asks for him to appear ready for duty, Ted shits his pants, literally.

Like many of his fellow countrymen of the day, some of whom now run the country, Ted was tough enough to hate Charlie from a safe distance, content in the knowledge that other kids were over there fighting for his right to tell everybody just how fucking tough he is.

As the cheese-eating surrender monkeys say, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose....