It's pandering pretty-boy pinheads like Garland singer-songwriter Austin Cunningham who are the best at appealing shamelessly to Best In Texas Music Magazine's brain-dead audience. His new Texas radio hit "Guns and Religion," highlighted in this month's issue of BIT, is supposedly based on a Barack Obama statement during a campaign appearance.

"I heard the President say

Campaigning that day

People in small towns get bitter and cling

To guns and religion

Like that's a dumb, backward thing

"Guns and Religion" is full of frat-boy bravado and that you'll-have-to-pry-my-gun-from-my-cold-dead-fingers faux-macho attitude that made John Wayne famous. Charlie Daniels made the mold for this spiteful music, and Toby Keith is the current world champion.

But what underlies Cunningham's "Guns and Religion" is the same thing that underlies Best In Texas and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity: a virulent hatred of Obama, the Democratic Party, and any sort of progressive thinking. Lonesome Onry and Mean is certain that we aren't the only ones who find this to be the ultimate head-in-the-sand double standard that always hides in this kind of anti-Obama propaganda, namely the fact that George W. Bush and his gun-nut, holier-than-thou, smarter-than-everyone cronies are the reason we find ourselves in this mess that Obama didn't create but rather inherited.

Since Cunningham is masquerading as some kind of deep thinker who sees how things really are, when is he going to write the song "George Bush Is a Huge Idiot and I Voted For Him Twice"? Never. When is he going to write "How Many Wars Do We Have to Fight (Before We Go Bankrupt)?"

In fact, none of the frat boys who make up the bulk of the "Texas music artists" - Roger Creager, Pat Green, and Cory Morrow would be the poster children - and who are touted and pushed by BIT are ever going to write those songs. Why? Because they are essentially playing to a moneyed, privileged, locked-in right-wing audience that is in major political denial. And they not only know it, they purposefully pander to it.

If Cunningham is so smart, why hasn't he written "Dick Cheney Owns a Shotgun (and He Shoots People in the Face with It)"? He probably hates Kinky Friedman's old song, "They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore."

LOM grew up in a small town and still spends many weekends in the small town where our father lives; LOM has a daughter in the military who has been on the front lines in Afghanistan; LOM has both pistols and rifles in our home; and LOM's religion is none of your damn business. But we'll be go-to-hell if we'll ever have this divisive, dumbass song in our truck.