Petition: Draft Ted Nugent to Serve in Afghanistan

Ted Nugent is perhaps the most courageous man in America. America needs courageous men. Hence, I've launched a petition to draft Ted Nugent to serve on the front lines in Afghanistan.

You may well wonder why Mr. Nugent has not already made this decision on his own. This is a complex medical affair: while courageous in a way rarely encountered this side of Chuck Norris, Mr. Nugent has long been plagued by an allergy to active duty. I stress that this is an allergy, not a personal disposition. There is a vast difference, yo.

Ted Nugent wants to fight. He just can't bring himself to do so, because of this unfortunate and rare ailment. We can help.

When called up to serve in Vietnam, Ted Nugent allegedly contracted a serious bowel condition. We have this allegation from an impeccable source: Ted Nugent. In an article in High Times magazine in 1977, Mr. Nugent described this rare and unpleasant intestinal failure in gruesome detail. When he finally presented himself for duty, he was a walking disease of a human being, and the army wouldn't touch him: "They'd call dead people before they'd call my ass."

Note that this in no way reflects upon Mr. Nugent's courage or capabilities. It is also, as "The Nuge" himself points out, something of an irony:

But you know the funny thing about it? I'd make an incredible army man. I'd be a colonel before you knew what hit you, and I'd have the baddest bunch of motherf*uckin' killers you'd ever seen in my platoon. But I just wasn't into it. I was too busy doin' my own thing, you know?

We do know. And now that your own thing involves rocking heavily on behalf of guns and the constitutional right to high-capacity magazines, you should have the opportunity to do it, right? Your own thing.

We can help.

Now, Mr. Nugent later denied the words above -- and, let's face it, they don't really sound like the decorous rhetoric we associate with the real Ted Nugent -- so we'll have to lean here on snopes.com : his deferment was of an educational sort (twice), before he was rejected "as a result of a physical examination." And that physical might have determined, for all we know, that The Nuge had a debilitating hangnail.

Still, the lingering suspicion dogs Mr. Nugent, and it's our collective duty to make this clear: that dog won't hunt. Hence, the "Draft Ted Nugent" campaign.

Historically, the draft has been a complex issue , to put it mildly. In 1918, the Supreme Court deemed it constitutional for Congress to mandate conscription: Congress gets to declare the war, so it gets to decide who's going to do the warring.

Twice, however, the president himself has shown personal muscle in this regard. The draft was altered by executive order in 1942, and again in 1953. Ladies and gentleman, we have a precedent. What decent, reasonable SCOTUS would sniff at an executive order this selective, exceptional, and patriotic? Hence, to bypass deadlock in Congress, we are presenting our petition directly to the White House.

Mr. President, draft the Nuge. Let them know what the Great American Satan looks like turned up to eleven.

Imagine you're a shy, cave-dwelling Talibanista, and you're confronted by a yowling Motor City staple of classic rock radio stations, shouldering a bazooka and clutching the Second Amendment and making that face that you see on the cover of Cat Scratch Fever.

(How do you say "gosh, that's quite something" in Pashto?)

President Obama, you owe it to the United States of America to draft this hunk o' has-been rockstar. Let the Nuge serve proudly and loudly on the front lines, before the war ends and he is forever denied this headlining gig.

Moreover, it is time to clear the Nugent name. As the Ted Nugent Draft is shouted from the mountaintops, let there also be proclaimed a bitchin' presidential pardon, forgiving Mr. Nugent for whatever caused him regretfully to decline active duty during the Vietnam War.

You're good to go, Ted. No cowardice in your past, and none in your future.

And when the last of the troops comes home, Colonel, we'll leave you to Wango Tango in Tora Bora, armed to the canines, and you can personally scour the caves for left-over bad guys: solo like Rambo. You'll have all the big-bored gun tech you could possibly dream of. There ain't no ban in the 'Stan -- you won't be prosthetically neutered by chickenshit small-capacity liberals. This will be the unfettered Nuge, a one-man death-dealin', cat-scratchin' war machine: the guy immortalized by Guitar World magazine for playing #7 in the "100 Worst Guitar Solos" of all time. Surely it's time to add to that honor a posthumous purple heart.

NOTE: The original petition on the US government site has been removed. We can argue about whether or not this constitutes censorship, but more important is to sign the new version of the petition, which I have launched on change.org:

Please sign here .

The petition reads: "Ted Nugent, draft dodger, should have the opportunity to redeem his sullied reputation, so that he can drown us in a cesspool of guns. In fact, we should make him do this. An executive order is appropriate: Mr. President, conscript the Nuge."