Ted Nugent told a radio host on Friday that he was sorry for calling President Barack Obama a “subhuman mongrel,” and offered up his idea of a glossary of slang. He regretted, he said,

using the street-fighter terminology of “subhuman mongrel” instead of just using more understandable language, such as, uh, “violator of his oath to the Constitution,” uh, “The liar that he is.”

Nugent, who plays music and talks about guns, had been invited to campaign with Greg Abbott, a Republican candidate for governor of Texas. At first, Nugent only really said that he was sorry “on behalf of much better men than myself”—the Republicans he had embarrassed, like Abbott and Rick Perry (“the greatest governor”), with whom he has also campaigned. Ben Ferguson, the radio host, had to ask if he was actually apologizing to the President—he said he was. But not before again positing that this is all a matter of dialect:

So yes, Ben, I apologize for using the term “subhuman mongrel,” and I will try to elevate my vernacular to the level of those great men that I’m learning from in the world of politics.

Where is this mysterious dictionary, in which “subhuman mongrel”—a direct racist slur, calling the President and the nine million or so Americans who identify themselves as multiracial animals, with an etymology that includes citations involving the Ku Klux Klan, slaveholders, and Nazis—is “street-fighter terminology” for a liar or breaker of oaths? How is it “vernacular” for anything but the legalese of Jim Crow, Dred Scott, and the anti-miscegenation laws that coexisted, since the country’s earliest years, with unpunished sexual violence against black women in the South and then, even in the nineteen-sixties, forced couples like Richard and Mildred Loving to flee their homes?

If there is no Roget’s of racism handy, one could also try a reverse lookup: what does Nugent think the “elevated” way of putting what he said might be? One would like to know the fancy words that he would translate as “subhuman mongrel”—is that what comes to mind every time he hears the word “liar,” applied to anybody, or any President, of any race? What modifiers does he find helpful? When, on CNN, Wolf Blitzer asked Perry if he’d admit that the phrase was “pretty vile,” Perry acknowledged only “pretty tough words,” ones that he himself wouldn’t use, as if it were a matter of class, tone, and bluntness. Blitzer put in a bid for “disgusting”; Perry again said, “pretty tough,” then added, “Look, we agree that is not appropriate language to use about the President of the United States.” Would it be appropriate about a clerk at a corner store?

Perhaps some context would clarify the translation problem. Here is the full quotation, from an interview Nugent gave at a gun show to S. H. Blannelberry of Guns.com:

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.

Does that help? It says something about the state of political discourse that only “subhuman mongrel” really got remarked on, in a rush of ugly invective. The theme is illegitimacy: Obama is not a real President, who was fairly elected; he “weasel[ed] his way into the top office”; he is a “gangster” who stole the White House because Americans weren’t “vigilant.” Obama is something artificial, “Communist-raised, Communist-educated, Communist-nurtured”—this is a reference to a deep vein of conspiracy thinking. And he has a white mother and a black father. He is a black man in the White House. Nugent doesn’t understand why Americans don't look at him and feel “shame.”

Conservative politicians like campaigning with Nugent and inviting him to the State of the Union. He seems, at times, to serve as a walking Rosetta Stone for them—a means of making it clear to audiences that their hints about the President, however elevated, can be read in other ways—that they are attuned to the Nugentian vernacular. The “subhuman mongrel” rant came before Abbott invited him to campaign with him, and he has, as the Dallas Morning News put it, “declined to repudiate” him. (Rand Paul, in admirably direct terms, did, tweeting that what Nugent said was “offensive and has no place in politics.”) Ted Cruz stuck to a smiling note that he, himself, used better language, adding, “I will note, there are reasons Ted Nugent—people listen to him, which is that he has been fighting passionately for Second Amendment rights. And—and this Administration has demonstrated an incredible hostility to the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens.” Is that what’s meant by a “street fighter”—someone trying to make sure everyone has a gun?

That raises another question: what does real vigilance, a true defense of America, look like? What is the opposite of shame? As it happens, the White House provided something of an answer on Friday, the same day as Nugent’s radio interview, when it announced that twenty-four service members would belatedly be recognized as having earned the Medal of Honor, some for valiant actions that took place more than seventy years ago—among them Manuel Mandoza, a sergeant who fought on a mountain in Italy in October, 1944—as well as in Korea and Vietnam. They were identified as part of a Pentagon review of actions that were ignored or downplayed because of discrimination; there would have been more, as the Post noted, if not for a 1973 fire that destroyed many records. Nineteen of them are Hispanic, Jewish, or black. There will be a ceremony at the White House on March 18th, and Barack Obama will hang the medals around the necks of three of the men. The rest have passed away, some a long time ago, from their wounds or old age or other causes, as one would expect given the passage of time; we are all human.

Photograph by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters.