Obama-Loving Rapper Will I. Am Slams Congress, Calls George W. Bush a 'Wacko'

September 7th, 2012 12:24 PM

“Will I. Am,” the rapper and Black Eyed Peas performer (born William Adams), was one of the staunchest celebrity Obama backers in 2008, and he’s clearly still starry-eyed. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he mysteriously claimed there’s too much division in America, and our only uniter is Obama. (Has he ever seen Obama’s negative ads?)

The musician confessed he didn’t vote until 2004, when he was 29 (and his band performed at the Democratic convention.) Why? “Bush. We had a wacko in the place that was tearing our country apart.” He also attacked Congress for “clogging” our national pipes:

THR: Why are you such a strong supporter of President Obama?

WILL I. AM: America is divided right now. It's suffering from division. With division, you can conquer. It's the classic case of divide and conquer right now, and the only politician, president, candidate that we have right now that can unite the country is Obama. We've seen that in 2008.

America needs to be treated like a family: with morals and values, with encouragement and education and dedication and discipline, not like a corporation. Being treated like a corporation got us to where we are now. We're people, we're not consumers. Although we consume, we're not even educated on what's healthy. So now we have consumers that aren't the healthiest people in the world — that's because our morals and our values are all out of whack. So we need to get that sense of family, that sense of urgency, that sense of cohesiveness and understanding and dedication and discipline. The only person that I would follow, if that's what we need to accomplish, is Obama.

THR: What motivated you to go to the polls?

WILL I. AM: Bush. We had a wacko in the place that was tearing our country apart.

THR: If you were to ever run for political office …

WILL I. AM: I wouldn't.

THR: Why?

WILL I. AM: Because I do philanthropy. It's something that, there's no blockade stopping me from doing it. There's no Congress, there's no spiderweb. A lot of the reason why Obama's having a hard time doing what we all know we should do is because of Congress. It's the invisible bogeyman that's clogging the pipes, but no one dares to even look to fix it, or doesn't know how to fix it.

In a separate interview with The Daily Beast, he praised the Bill Clinton speech along similar lines:

"It made me proud to be an American,” he says with excitement. “When I saw Bill Clinton’s speech, I didn’t say, ‘Yay, Democrats!’ I said, ‘Americans!’ His speech was not about Republicans; it was about opportunists that don’t care about people’s well being. That’s what we’re dealing with. It isn’t Democrats vs. Republicans, it’s Americans vs. manipulators and corrupt business practices.”

No one interrupted as the rapper unloaded loopy theories about how Republicans are dictators and perhaps the Republicans threw the 2008 election on purpose:

“Imagine if a dictator wanted to come up here and have their way with your family and your future? That’s what seems to be happening. And the reason why they’re here is because people are so nonchalant about policies and issues. People are so engulfed by their day-to-day drama and things that are so insignificant in the larger scheme of things, so there’s an open door for a Mitt Romney or a George W. Bush...”

“How do we know that McCain and Palin wasn’t just a ploy to take four years off, knowing they weren’t going to win, to pit Obama against Hillary and divide the Democrats?” he says. “How do we know they aren’t that strategic? They went to war without anyone signing off on it. We spend trillions on defense in the name of people in caves. How strategic are these people?”

Was a journalist going to tell this high-flying entertainer that there was actually a congressional vote to authorize going to war? (Okay, perhaps not in Libya.....) Apparently, he was like John Belushi’s character in Animal House. He was on a roll...