BOB TAFT MAY BE THE WORST GOVERNOR IN HISTORY... BUT WAIT TIL MICHIGAN GETS TED NUGENT (WHO WANTS TO NUKE IRAQ)

When it came out in 1977 I sort of liked Cat Scratch Fever" (although not enough to actually play it on my radio show) and there was something almost cool-- albeit a little derivative-- about The Amboy Dukes' "Journey to the Center of the Mind" about 10 years before that. But I was booking bands in my college at the time-- The Doors, Big Brother, The Who, Pink Floyd, The Dead, Hendrix, Otis Redding, Jackson Browne, Tim Buckley, Muddy Waters-- and I never seriously considered booking Ted Nugent. And those were the only songs of his I ever had a positive feeling about. To me the wanna-be-gross Ted Nugent was always just a wanna-be, an excessive one-- as well as a deaf one. And when he reared his head again in the 1990s with Damn Yankees, a "supergroup" of corporate mediocrity, his music reached new lows. It wasn't until the 90s that I realized that the annoying and tasteless musician was also a rightwing imbecile. I knew he was a hunting maniac but that isn't something I get as upset about as some of my friends. It just reinforced my overall feeling that he is completely gross.

Later I read a typically over-the-top speech he gave as a speaker at an NRA convention, advocating murder and vigilantism. "Remember the Alamo! Shoot 'em! To show you how radical I am, I want carjackers dead. I want rapists dead. I want burglars dead. I want child molesters dead. I want the bad guys dead. No court case. No parole. No early release. I want 'em dead. Get a gun and when they attack you, shoot 'em." Yes, "No court case" is particularly telling.

Big tough guy-- and, of course, a die-hard Republican shill and major supporter of Bush's war against Iraq. In fact, he loves war-- as long as other people and their kids are the ones who are fighting it, of course (after all, he is and millionaire Republican and that is a basic tenet of millionaire Republicans: "war good as long as other people have to fight it." In fact in 1990 Nugent explained to his hometown paper, the DETROIT FREE PRESS, how he had avoided the draft during the VietNam War. He claims that 30 days before his Draft Board Physical, he stopped all forms of personal hygiene. The last ten days he ingested nothing but junk food and Pepsi, and a week before his physical he stopped using the bathroom altogether, virtually living inside pants caked with excrement and stained by his urine. He claims that's how he got his deferment and adds, "but if I would have gone over there, I'd have been killed, or I'd have killed... or I'd have killed all the hippies in the foxholes… I would have killed everybody." No doubt. Goldfinger wrote a cool song about him called "Fuck Ted Nugent.

When the Illinois Republican Party was desperately hunting for someone to run for the U.S. Senate seat against Barack Obama, they approached Michigan-born/Texas resident Nugent, who turned them down and they were forced to settle on a certifiably insane person from Maryland. Nugent, however, wants to move back to Michigan and run for governor, probably inspired by Kinky Freidman's current race in Texas (and by the electoral success of fellow clowns Arnold Schwarzenegger and that wrestler from Minnesota a few years ago).

According to today's INDEPENDENT the 58 year old neo-fascist Bush backer-- yes, he's one of the 29%; they have a mutual admiration society of two losers-- is definitely looking to run for office. The INDEPENDENT tries explaining Nugent to their British readers: "A keen admirer of fellow-guitarist Tony Blair, he abhors drugs, including alcohol, and maintains that he has never used such substances. He considers homosexuality morally wrong. He speaks about Muslims in a way which, were he to repeat it on globally networked television, might endanger his life. Nugent is aiming to run as Governor of Michigan in 2010." He brags to the Brits about his visit to Fallujah in 2004. "I
visited Saddam Hussein's master war room. It was a glorious moment. It looked like something out of Star Wars. I saw his gold toilet. I shit in his bidet... Our failure has been not to Nagasaki them." That wakes the interviewer up.

"Is that opinion shared by your friends in the Republican Party?"

"Most of them feel that way."

"At what level?"

"I've heard it from high-level senators and congressmen."

"How high?"

"The highest."

"Do you mean Rumsfeld, Cheney, or Bush?"

"No," he says, with a defiant look.