In one of the most bizarre crossovers in American political history, at the peak of his reality show fame, resident bat-biter Ozzy Osbourne was the guest of honour at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2002.
Quite who was in charge of the invites remains to be seen. But Ozzy, a man who had to quit acid after a horse told him to fuck off, felt as though he couldn’t say no. He bumped shoulders with the Washington elite when he swaggered into the hallowed halls, managing to rub up the then-President George W Bush entirely the wrong way after fully embracing the free bar and revelling in the warm reception.
A lighthearted slideshow was presented to the room of celebrities and journalists hosted by the president, one of which showed then-Vice President Dick Cheney urinating on the doors of the Oval Office. It was a gag aimed at Osbourne, who was infamously banned from Texas for life after doing the same, only on the sacred Alamo Cenotaph.
Speaking about the Alamo incident, Ozzy quipped, “I was legless with a bottle of Courvoisier in my hand at nine o’clock in the morning, and I wanted to take a pee. So I find this old wall, and I had this green evening dress on, and I’m standing there having a leak.” He claimed he had no clue that he was whiddling on a national monument.
But he was rather more certain that he wished he had wee’d on the White House instead after a disastrous night with Bush. When he recalled the weird night to ShortList, Ozzy confessed he had consumed three bottles of wine before he arrived – much to wife Sharon’s annoyance – potentially to dampen the nerves about meeting the bloody president, who he described, plainly, as a “c*nt”.
Osbourne claimed that he never spoke to the president and that nobody would go near him regardless. “I was off me fucking nuts,” Ozzy confessed. “I’ve met him, I’ve met Bill Clinton, I’ve met loads of them. But they’re very strange people.”
He continued, “Hillary Clinton was wonderful, a very nice lady.”
But on Bush, who was famed for loving the country legend George Jones, the Black Sabbath frontman said he never quite “got his deal”. As for Bush’s experience meeting Osbourne, he was rumoured to have been so wound up by the drunken antics that he muttered: “This might have been a mistake”.
In an attempt at diplomacy, Osbourne added that the September 11th attacks were a “kick in the pants” for the president. “I don’t suppose he expected World War 3 to begin when he got voted in,” mused the late ‘Paranoid’ singer. “It was a bit of a shocker. He hadn’t been in office more than five minutes, and 9/11 went down. We were in New York when that happened”. But naturally, he said he wasn’t scared by that.
In fact, he curiously claimed that he experienced an emotion closer to excitement. “It was my kind of craziness,” he explained. “The day after that happened, there was fucking nobody in New York.”
Adding, “I remember standing on the steps of the hotel, and – you know when you see an old cowboy film and that tumbleweed rolls past on the ground? There was newspapers just floating around on the streets. It was so fucking weird.”
Ozzy remembered everyone fleeing to Manhattan, unsure if this situation would worsen. In one of the most incisive political assessments of the century, he said: “I hope this ISIS lot don’t get going.” And in a typically dystopian Sabbath way, he added: “I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s in mankind to try to kill each other for one thing or another.”
That’s something that he always looked to tackle with his music – perhaps Bush could’ve learnt something from it.
