Ted Nugent fires up GOP crowd, and not in a good way

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- Hours after Gov. Rick Perry kicked off his second full term in office, Ted Nugent helped him celebrate at a black-tie gala, but not all attendees were pleased by the rocker's performance.

Using machine guns as props, Nugent, 58, appeared onstage as the final act of the inaugural ball wearing a cutoff T-shirt emblazoned with the Confederate flag and shouting offensive remarks about non-English speakers, according to people who were in attendance.

"Ted Nugent is a good friend of the governor's. He asked him if he would play at the inaugural. He didn't put any stipulation of what he would play," Black said.

"I think it was a horrible choice," GOP strategist Royal Masset said. "I hope nobody approved it."

Nugent, a hunting and gun-rights advocate, couldn't be reached for comment Thursday because he was hunting, a spokeswoman said.

The guitarist -- known as the "Motor City Madman" -- lived in Michigan most of his life before moving to Crawford in 2003. He is famed for his 1977 hit "Cat Scratch Fever."

News of Nugent's appearance at the ball drew criticism from civil rights leaders.

"Whenever someone sports the Confederate battle flag, many Texans will be offended, and rightly so, because of what it symbolizes: the enslavement of African-Americans and more recently the symbol of hate groups and terrorists," said Gary Bledsoe, president of the Texas chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Would you like to see the Confederate Flag Banned?

Nope. I just think it's not a fitting symbol for the party of Lincoln and thus has no place in an official GOP function. Jefferson Davis was a Democrat. Let the Democrats have that flag.

Besides, I remember reading that LESS than 5-percent of Southerners of the pre-Civil War era actually owned slaves. And many openly opposed the idea of slavery.

I believe it was a lot more than 5% who were a part of slaveowning when you consider that a lot more than 5% of households owned slaves.

But when the time came, they joined the militias of their individual states out of a noble sense of honor, Southern honor.

You don't read the same history books that I do. I read of a heavy-handed conscription system far more onerous than anything in the North. I read about widespread desertion from the reb army as more and more of the conscripted mass realized that the slaveowners' confederacy wasn't worth dying for.

Several counties in my home state of Pennsylvania fought on the Confederate side...

Too bad for those counties in PA. Hopefully for the good name of those counties people will forget that. There was a lot more counties in the South that supported the Union. The funny thing was that those Unionist southern counties were the ones where slaveowning was largely absent which sheds some light on what really inspired the rebellion.

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