David Neiwert on Ted Nugent

Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate war criminal and co-founder of the Ku Klux Klan: his soul goes marching on

David Neiwert has a very worthwhile post on Ted Nugent's recent lunatic rant and the reaction (and non-reaction) to it by conservative publicists like Sean Hannity:

Like nearly everyone, I was intrigued by Ted Nugent's open advocacy of killing Democrats - which seemed pretty clearly the upshot of his rant wishing the violent deaths of nearly every one of the Democratic candidates during a recent concert. It was, after all, not just a startling example of the viciousness that right-wing rhetoric now revels in (it's classic hate speech, really), but also yet another notable example of the march of eliminationist rhetoric.

Nugent is such a parody of himself, a gibbering lunatic, that it's hard to take him seriously - and thus, obviously, it would be easy for the mainstream right to distance itself from him. Just issue a few of the standard expressions of horror, assure the rest of us you recoil at the thought of even being associated with sentiments like Nugent's, and then we can all move on, right?

Well, no. Hasn't happened.

He also calls attention to the reaction of one of the top conservative bloggers, Michelle Malkin, who wrote a book titled Unhinged about the alleged wild-eyed extremism common among Democrats. She argued that rightwing bloggers are very critical of any conservatives who engage in such conduct - a laughable notion on the face of it.

Her response to Republican rocker Ted Nugent's well-publicized hate-mongering and encouragement of murder? Previously she had called Nugent "a Republican rock star". As of mid-morning today when Neiwert was writing, her comments about Nugent had amounted to the sound of "crickets chirping", i.e., she hadn't mentioned it at all. It's normally kind of pointless to criticize people like her for what they haven't said. But since she has made a point of arguing that her wing of the blogosphere - and her blog is one of the top ten in terms of traffic, last I saw - is so much better than Left Blogostan at criticizing such behavior by rightwingers, it does kind of stick out that this well-publicized video of her "Republican rock star" hasn't cranked up her outrage.

Neiwert also comments on Sean Hannity's defense of Nugent's rant:

See, in Hannityland - which, like much of the rest of the right-wing universe, resembles nothing so much as Bizarro World - wishing aloud that you could blow away the country's most prominent liberals in graphic fashion, and getting the crowd to cheer along, why, that's exactly the same as Barack Obama explaining his military strategy by including the perfectly accurate understanding that air raids produce civilian casualties. It's the same thing as the Dixie Chicks saying they were embarrassed by President Bush. It's no different than anonymous commenters of undetermined background on Michelle Malkin's blog sending her hateful messages.

This whole thing reminded me of the well-orchestrated Republican campaign back in late 2003 to tut-tut at the Democrats for their alleged hatred and vast anger at Our Dear Leader Bush. David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, James Taranto and others were weighing in with their concern about such terrible conduct. The psychiatrist Dr. Krauthammer (he really is a psychiatrist) called it "the unhinging of the Democratic Party."

Our Leader himself in a FOX News interview gave his opinion on this troubling phenomenon:

I don't mind people trying to pick apart my policies, and that's fine and that's fair game. But, you know, I don't think we're serving our nation well by allowing the discourse to become so uncivil that people say - use words that they shouldn't be using.

Sadly, Neiwert's conclusion is a reasonable one:

Nugent, perhaps unwittingly, has provided the conservative movement with its own "Go Cheney Yourself" moment - the moment when it openly chooses to embrace the ugliest facet of the national discourse. It's the moment when all of its handwringing and finger-pointing about "civility" and the supposed ugliness of liberal rhetoric is exposed, finally, for the empty and cynical ploy that it is.

And when, inevitably, some right-wing nutcase decides to empty a gun in the direction of a liberal candidate because Ted Nugent thought it was a great idea and Sean Hannity did too ... well, expect them, somehow, to find a way to blame liberals for it.

Tags: authoritarianism, republican party, ted nugent