Jake DiMare is officially calling bullshit on Ted Nugent’s patriotic, tough-guy act.

It’s time to add a another word to my own personal definition of what it means to be a Good Man: ‘Duty’. As in, the philosophical concept of duty…When one feels a moral commitment or obligation to someone or something. Often, duty manifests itself as patriotism. A strong sense of commitment to one’s own country. Those men and women with a strong sense of patriotic duty will put the best interests of their country before their own.

Many right-wing conservatives are vociferous war hawks. They will often claim this sense of patriotic duty as justification for putting young men and women in harm’s way. Ironically, it is often the loudest voices among the pro-war crowd who have a strange twist in their back story.

Enter Vietnam War draft dodger Theodore Anthony ‘Ted’ Nugent. A man so patriotic he literally wears American flags on stage while playing a guitar with an American flag painted on it. A man so dedicated to American conservative ideals he brings guns out onto the stage between songs. A man so bound by duty he spent the time between receiving notification he’d been drafted to serve in Vietnam and appearing before the draft board…Well…shitting his pants.

I’ve got a serious question for conservative readers of the Good Men Project: Am I the only person who is confused when the GOP doesn’t distance itself from this guy? In a 1990 interview with the Free Press Ted Nugent explained how he intentionally avoided the draft:

“He claims that 30 days before his Draft Board Physical, he stopped all forms of personal hygiene. The last 10 days he ingested nothing but junk food and Pepsi, and a week before his physical, he stopped using the bathroom altogether, virtually living inside his pants caked with excrement and urine. That spectacle won Nugent a deferment.”





His father must have been so proud. Here’s a guy who literally bragged about how going to the Vietnam war scared him so much, he shit his pants.





The New Hampshire Gazette has gone so far as to come up with a title for this special category of hypocrites: The Chicken Hawks. They’ve even created an online database where you can learn more about specific Chicken Hawks, and the tactics they employed to avoid duty to their country when their time came.





If you have the time, check it out. It makes for some enlightening and entertaining reading.

Photo: AP