Texas's Greg Abbott Defends Campaigning With His 'Blood Brother' Ted Nugent
Rock star Ted Nugent is best known for his hatred of President Obama and his deep love of guns. In January, he declared Obama is a "subhuman mongrel."
.Rock star Ted Nugent is best known for his hatred of President Obama and his deep love of guns. In January, he declared Obama is a "subhuman mongrel." Now, he's on the campaign trail with Texas gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott, and Democrats aren't happy. Abbott's Democratic opponent, famed filibusterer Wendy Davis, called Abbott's decision to campaign with Nugent "repulsive."
"I think the fact that Greg Abbott is embracing those values is repulsive. And that Texans should consider it and will consider it," she told a local Texas CNN affiliate Tuesday. In a January interview with Guns.com, Nugent delivered this line:
I have obviously failed to galvanize and prod, if not shame enough Americans to be ever vigilant not to let a Chicago communist-raised, communist-educated, communist-nurtured subhuman mongrel like the acorn community organizer gangster Barack Hussein Obama to weasel his way into the top office of authority in the United States of America.
It's like all your uncle's racist chain emails combined into one sentence. Previously, Nugent was interviewed by the Secret Service for insisting that he would be "dead or in jail" if Obama was reelected in 2012.
Abbott is not shy about his association with the rock star. Nugent introduced Abbott as his "friend" and "blood brother" at a recent campaign event. Abbott says, "Sen. Davis knows she is suffering with voters because of her flipping and flopping on Second Amendment gun laws, and she knows that Ted Nugent calls her out on her disregard for Second Amendment rights. We are going to expose Sen. Davis’s weaknesses on the Second Amendment and show that in this area and in so many other areas, she represents the liberalism of Barack Obama that is so bad for Texas."
CNN's Wolf Blitzer and Newt Gingrich went head-to-head on the issue Tuesday night. Blitzer argues that Nugent has taken a page out of Hitler's book with his rhetoric about Obama. "That’s what the Nazis called Jews to justify the genocide of the Jewish community," he said. "They called them untermenschen, subhuman mongrels. If you read some of the literature that the Nazis put out there, there is a long history of that specific phrase he used involving the president of the United States." (This is true.) Gingrich's response? Democrats are racist, too. "The Saturday before the 2000 election, Al Gore went to a black church and charged that George W. Bush would appoint judges to return blacks to be counted as three-fifths of a person," he says. Outrage over Nugent is "selective outrage."
GOP strategist Ana Navarro took a similar tack on CNN Wednesday morning, pointing out that Democrats associate with Bill Maher, who once called Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann "MILFs."
Nugent seems to be the person who's most happy with the situation. "I moved to Texas 12 years ago because this is special," he said during a campaign stop on Tuesday. "There is no other Texas anymore. This is the last bastion of rugged individualism, of true independence."