What you say at NRA rallies takes you places you don’t want to be

By RANDA WAGNER, Editor

Some days you’re bet­ter off just stay­ing in bed. Even if you’re famous.

Poor ol’ Ted Nugent. The “Motor City Mad­man” is learn­ing the hard way you can’t always say what’s on your mind and get away with it, even in the United States. The pow­ers that be have their lim­its, and he tested them out.

When I read the news arti­cle that quoted him as say­ing, “If Barack Obama becomes the pres­i­dent in Novem­ber again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year,” at this Spring’s National Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion con­ven­tion in St. Louis, I thought, “Uh oh, if I didn’t know bet­ter, that sounded like a threat.” I watched the seg­ment of the radio inter­view the quote came from and yes, he really did say that, includ­ing call­ing some of the U.S.’s higher pro­file politi­cians some highly unsa­vory names, as well as dub­bing Pres­i­dent Obama’s admin­is­tra­tion “vile, evil and America-hating.”

Sure, Ted’s a lit­tle nuts… but is he dangerous?

Even though I was con­fi­dent the ‘70’s rock-and-roller turned-survivalist’ wouldn’t really act on his words, I had a feel­ing he was going to get a visit from the CIA, FBI or one of the secu­rity agen­cies. Sure enough, the Secret Ser­vice gave him a call and said, “Let’s talk.” Hmmmm…. bet they weren’t going to be serv­ing tea and cook­ies with this visit.

The com­ments were made on a Mon­day. When I read Mr. Nugent’s com­ments AFTER the Secret Ser­vice ‘chat’ on Thurs­day, I didn’t rec­og­nize him anymore.

In a state­ment, Nugent said he “met with two fine, pro­fes­sional Secret Ser­vice agents” in Okla­homa, in a, “Good, solid, pro­fes­sional meet­ing con­clud­ing that I have never made any threats of vio­lence towards any­one. The meet­ing could not have gone better.”

Nugent said he was just speak­ing fig­u­ra­tively when he made what some ‘per­ceived’ to be threats against Obama and that he didn’t threaten anyone’s life or advo­cate violence.

“The meet­ing could not have gone bet­ter,” he said. “I thanked them for their ser­vice, we shook hands and went about our busi­ness. God bless the good fed­eral agents, wher­ever they may be.”

“Huh? Where’s Ted? What did you do with him?” I thought to myself. The man that emerged from that meet­ing had clearly been ‘con­vinced’ by the ‘nice men’ he met with that there were forces out there even big­ger and bad­der than he was and, no mat­ter how many guns you own or big game you’ve bagged, you don’t make even veiled threats against the Com­man­der in Chief and get away with it.

“The issue has been resolved,” agency spokesman Brian Leary said in a state­ment. “The Secret Ser­vice does not antic­i­pate any fur­ther action.”

Oops.… except for an out-of-the-blue mis­de­meanor hunt­ing vio­la­tion that sud­denly sur­faced after his ‘bond­ing ses­sion’ with fed­eral agents.

Seems Ted took one more black bear than allowed on a hunt­ing expe­di­tion in Alaska. Though he killed and trans­ported one bear, he had wounded another ear­lier in the hunt, some­thing he didn’t appar­ently know was ille­gal until he got in trouble.

The result? Accord­ing to online media sources, Nugent is banned from hunt­ing in Alaska for one year, will spend two years on pro­ba­tion, and must pay a $10,000 fine. He has also pledged to pro­duce a pub­lic ser­vice mes­sage that will air on his show every sec­ond week for a year and will pay $600 to the state of Alaska.

They sure ‘made an exam­ple’ of Mr. Nugent now, didn’t they?

The United States used to be ‘the land of the free and home of the brave.” While we still have more free­dom and rights than most of the world, our rights are being slowly ‘whit­tled away at’ every day by the politi­cians we put into office. It seems to be hap­pen­ing at an accel­er­ated pace lately, what with that nasty NDAA act loom­ing over us now and a new ver­sion of SOPA try­ing be slipped under Con­gress’ door. Now, I’m not say­ing it was okay for the “Wild Man of Rock n Roll” to say what he did at the rally, but I can see this inci­dent serv­ing as a pro­pel­lant to put even stronger cen­sor­ship laws into place. All for the good of the coun­try, of course.

What do you want to bet we don’t hear any­thing from Ted for quite some time about ANYTHING? The man so many peo­ple thought was so crazy for so long might be just sane enough to lay low enough to save his land, home and fam­ily. After mulling over his com­ments that fol­lowed his visit with those ‘nice men,’ chances are good that keep­ing those things near­est and dear­est to him were part of the bar­gain. We’ll never know now, will we?

Posted by Randa Wagner on May 2 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.