I’ve had a hard spot in my pants for Ted Nugent for decades. He was on the undercard of my first unsupervised rock show: Ted Nugent, Nazareth, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Aerosmith at RFK Stadium in May 1976. D.C. hasn’t seen a bill like this before or since. And what a crowd! It was like the Hajj for suburban dirtballs.

Nugent opened the show and was fabulous. I remember him getting out of a limo next to the stage and doing cartwheels as he took the stage. I was in awe.

But while I’m still awed by the power of, say, “Stranglehold,” he’s made it hard over the years to separate the man from the rock and the roll. His non-musical persona has dominated for a long while now, and it’s an ugly, ugly thing. I saw him at Nissan Pavilion several years ago, and the performance had more anti-gay and anti-immigrant railing than guitar wailing.

Now comes more evidence that he really is nothing more than a sad, mean touch-hole. He admitted in a California court recently to baiting deer for pay. This isn’t about being the outdoorsy sort that Nugent always boasts when making his pro-meat tirades. This is about being a bullying, simple killer. Hunting is surely a skill; it doesn’t take brains or brawn to set a trap for an animal then shoot it, which is what he admitted to. And Nugent wasn’t killing the young deer for food or out of respect for the man-vs.-nature battle that’s been waged since we lived in caves. He was killing for reality TV.

The L.A. Times’ story attracted a commenter who summed Nugent up so well that the commenting policy advertised adjacently was ignored: