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 guest of honour at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2002. He bumped shoulders with the Washington elite, 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 light-hearted 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 famously banned from Texas for life after doing the same, only on the scared Alamo Cenotaph.
When he recalled the weird night to ShortList, he confessed he’d had three bottles of wine before he came – much to wife Sharon’s annoyance – potentially to dampen the nerves about meeting Bush, who he described, plainly, as a “c*nt”.
Oabourne said 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. Hillary Clinton was wonderful, a very nice lady.” On Bush, 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 his drunken antics he muttered: “This might have been a mistake”.
In an attempt at diplomacy, Osbourne added that the September 11 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 Osbourne. “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 – but excited.
“It was my kind of craziness,” he explained. “The day after that happened, there was fucking nobody in New York. 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.”
