Megadeth singer and guitarist Dave Mustaine believes Barack Obama was born somewhere outside the United States, and he’s not crazy about GOP candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich either.
The comments came in an interview with George Stroumboulopoulos on the Canadian television show “The Hour.”
Calling himself a “lesser of evil” kind of guy, Mustaine commented on the eligibility issue and the GOP field of candidates in 2012 before clamming up, saying, “I don’t want to talk about my president.”
Before he closed down, he said he’s concerned about life in America at the moment, as the government takes away more rights.
He said for him, the big issue is the right to freedom of speech: “I’ve got a big mouth.”
He has a lot of questions about Obama but “certainly not where he was born.”
“I know he was born somewhere else than America,” Mustaine said.
When the host brought up Obama’s history, the rocker said, “How come he was invisible until he became … whatever he was in Illinois?”
Stroumboulopoulos concluded Mustaine must be a “birther.”
Mustaine replied, “I don’t want to talk about my president.”
He said his song “We The People,” on his new “13” album, sums up what is happening in America: “People having their savings stripped away, Wall Street run amok, $500 million given to Solyndra when the Obama administration knew it was going under.”
“I’ll have to do some more homework where Obama came from now,” he said.
Turning to the GOP primaries, Mustaine showed his support for Rick Santorum, who appears to have no chance of overcoming front-runner Romney.
“It’s such a disappointment watching what’s happening right now,” he said. “George Soros came out and said Romney is just like Obama. So you have Obama’s mentor saying Romney’s like him!
“And Gingrich is so completely angry.”
But Santorum, Mustaine said, is “to me, the guy that makes the most sense. … He just looked like he would be a really cool president. Like a JFK-kind of guy.”
Mustaine, with Metallica for a time in the 1980s before launching Megadeth, has gone through several battles with drugs and alcohol. He’s also sustained neck injuries from the “head-banging” of hard rock, as well as an arm injury.
He explained he had been baptized as a Lutheran as a child, but then his mother became a Jehovah’s Witness.
“They don’t celebrate Christmas. That sucked,” he said. “They don’t celebrate birthdays, which sucked. I couldn’t have friends that were normal people, because they were ‘of the world.’
“I felt really empty. The drugs weren’t doing it. The alcohol wasn’t doing it,” he said.
It was like “peeing in your pants on a cold night. It feels good for a little while, but it’s not a long-term solution,” he said.
He sought out friends he knew to be familiar with Christianity.
“I started to make amends to people I had harmed. I am enemy-free right now, which is a great feeling,” he said.
The interview:
