didn't St. Ronnie give MH a full pardon? Wouldn't that, if nothing else, tend to sway Merle toward being a conservative? Dunno, but it seems reasonable.

Now, the comment about Merle writing anti-hippie songs ... I seriously doubt if he would know a real hippie if he tripped over one. What hippies was he singing about? The hippies of San Francisco leading up to Apr-Sep 1967, what is known as the summer of love. You know the ones ... they were the Janice Joplin types, the wannabe beatniks that simply didn't understand there was more to the Bohemian culture than just being rejected by society and rejecting society in return. The ones that could adjust their indulgence in psychedelic rock on an equal basis with their drug consumption while imagining they were experiencing a great ceremony of coming together after never having a friend in the world.

Or was he singing about the hippies that were the product of the summer of love that ushered in the excessive drug use, the deaths in the streets, the mass arrests, police confrontations leading to racial tensions, gawk-off by the public (yes, that actually happened), the teen pregnancies, the general filth and disease that ran rampant in the streets?

I suspect he wasn't singing about any of them in particular but rather he was singing against all of them because they didn't fit within his dry-drunk, confused, god-n-country-above-all, herd-mentality mind. How I would love to ask him about his music during that time frame and it's philosophical foundation.

He deserves neither forgiveness nor thanks for rolling over at this point in time. It is way to late for that. The damage by the Bush admin has been done and there is nothing he can say or do that will change it.

He has blood on his hands.

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"Mister Downchild, please take a fools advice -- never let no one woman misuse you twice"

Sonny Boy Williamson II and the Yardbirds at the Crawdaddy club, London, 1964