Photo by Rik Goldman via flickr.com/photos

Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine has always made quite a bit of hay out of his surly metalhead persona. When he was dumb, young, and having what could charitably be considered an intermittent relationship with reality, this persona played right into the image of metal as the party of miscreants at the back of the popular music bus: where only the cool anti-heroes hung out and occasionally set things on fire. But even back then, Mustaine was really just a dunce to whom someone made the mistake of giving a microphone because he could play guitar REALLY fast. And since he’s happily confined himself to the no-man’s land between ignorant blowhard and boring simpleton, let’s take a moment to consider, in the wake of his retracted endorsement of Rick Santorum, a few snapshots of Dave Mustaine: MegaDick.

“I don’t wanna talk about this. The last thing I need is a bunch of homos picketing us.”

This example of Mustaine’s offensive and brash sense of entitlement was delivered during a 1988 interview, during which he was asked what he thought about Judas Priest’s openly gay frontman Rob Halford. While trying to avoid outing himself as a homophobe, Dave went ahead and definitively outed himself as (d’oh!) just that.

“People in the music business, in America, are talking bad about Bush … you know what? Shut the fuck up! You’re a musician, you don’t know a thing about running a country! If there would have been a better man to run the States right now, we would have picked him. It’s a democratic process. There are a couple of guys who run for office, everybody picks him, he goes to the next level. Shut up, he’s the fucking president! There’s gonna be an election, if you don’t like him go for the other guy. Don’t sit back there and just piss and moan. I see all these guys like Michael Moore going off, and I’m like “dude, you don’t have a fucking idea about what you’re talking about.”

This is from a 2004 interview in Metal Temple. Clearly Mustaine has some strong opinions about musicians mouthing off about politics. But it seems that such vitriol should only be directed toward those not named Dave Mustaine, considering the only records in his body of work that anyone gives a crap about deal with — gasp — politics and war and religion and peace. And, like, earth to Dave: No one wants to hear you sing about anything else. Nobody likes your last five albums.

But ok, maybe he’s older and wiser. And though the sentiment was expressed with the subtlety of an aircraft carrier in a backyard pool, it’s true that people usually don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to politics, celebrity or not.

But wait, apparently there’s one teeny exception to his rule. And that exception is Dave Mustaine.

“I look at the way Obama has been selling our country off and all the ways things are happening and the way that our economy is plummeting. Why won’t we tap Alaska? And why did we take so long to act on the Gulf? Why did we take so long to act in Libya? Why?! Where’s his birth certificate? You know what, that birth certificate he showed everybody … I remember buying one of those to go buy booze. Hello Obama. C’mon dude, they used to sell those in the back of Creem magazine for $3.”

It was in Goldmine magazine that Dave decided to go and close the hypocrisy loop. Not only did he go back on the tiny grain of logic, however twisted, that he espoused in the previous quote, but he threw his lot in with birthers! BIRTHERS! A movement that safely ensconces Dave in the towering intellectual shadow of Orly Taitz and whose membership is basically short-hand for “HELP! I AM THE WORST CASE SCENARIO OF AND BEST ARGUMENT AGAINST PUBLIC INTERNET ACCESS.”

But that’s not the only conspiracy Dave has touched on. We mustn’t forget Godless liberals indoctrinating children through facts and science:

“It’s pretty clear that they’re taking prayer out of school. It’s been happening for a very long time. The very first schoolbook that was written had God all over it. I collect books and I have some really, really old schoolbooks, and God is mentioned on every single page. They’re taking God out of the schools to dumb us down.”

Dave went all Holy War on MTV in this interview from December. I guess he forgot that pesky, though essential concept of separation of church and state, which includes state-run schools. Maybe Dave would like to go back to the days of yore when Catholics and Jews were banished from the colonies and when women were accused of witchcraft? Why would we want to improve and evolve? Maybe we should all be forced to wear T-shirts from the Creation Museum with pictures of Jesus riding a T-Rex.

“If I were President of the United States, I’d build a great wall along the Mexican border and not let anybody in. … The beauty is gone when you see Americans sleeping on sidewalks, and it makes me sick to think we have assholes in this country letting fucking Mexicans in. Who needs this shit?”

And so we return to the infamous, contentious 1988 interview Dave gave to British journalist Roy Wilkinson of Sounds magazine. Of all his quotes, this is my favorite because it totally encompasses all the colors of the Dave Mustaine stupidity rainbow. It lacks any trace of self-awareness, it’s based on absurd stereotypes, and the only idea it communicates clearly is that the speaker has all the value of a fart in a tin can between his ears. It also really helps to understand why Dave thinks a guy like Rick Santorum, who once said Boston children suffered abuse at the hands of Catholic priests because the city is liberal, is positively presidential.

By Daniel Zambrano 

Alaska, birth certificate, birthers, Boston, Bush, Creation Museum, Creem, Dave Mustaine, dinosaurs, Godless liberals, Jesus, Judas Priest, Libya, Megadeth, Obama, Orly Taitz, Rick Santorum, Roy Wilkinson