Billy Ray Cyrus Regrets Letting Miley Do Hannah Montana

Billy Ray Cyrus gave a lengthy interview with GQ and it was depressing. The whole thing is full of sadness and regret. It’s like an old man on his death bed recounting his failures.

Billy starts off by adamantly insisting he never made a dime off his daughter Miley Cyrus. He also clears the air saying Miley’s handlers used him as a scapegoat for Miley’s borderline retarded decisions.

On being the scapegoat
“Every time something happened in Miley’s career, every time the train went off the track, if you will—Vanity Fair,2 pole-dancing,3 whatever scandal it was—her people, or as they say in today’s news, her handlers, every time they’d put me… ‘Somebody’s shooting at Miley! Put the old man up there!’ Well, I took it, because I’m her daddy, and that’s what daddies do. ‘Okay, nail me to the cross, I’ll take it….’?”

On why he didn’t go to Miley’s 18th birthday party
“You know why I didn’t go? Because they were having it in a bar. It was wrong. It was for 21 years old and up. Once again all them people, they all wanted me to fly out so that then when all the bad press came they could say, ‘Daddy endorsed this stuff….’ I started realizing I’m being used. If I would have went out there I would have been right in the middle of all this stuff that’s going on right now with the bong. They’d be hanging it on my ass. I had the common sense… I said, ‘This whole thing’s falling apart up there and they just want to blame all of this stuff on you again.’ I’m staying out of it.”

On Miley’s photo scandal
Not long after the party, Cyrus heard that Miley’s people were looking for something. That maybe his daughter’s phone had been stolen. “And that was on the heels, the week previous, of some pictures from Spain4—a five- or seven-day period of just boom! There’s a train wreck happening and my daughter’s right in the middle of it.” Now he was hearing “stories of the handlers trying to make kids’ computers disappear and their phones disappear.” That’s all he knew. “I didn’t know what the footage was.”

On everything being David Lynch’s fault, yes, that David Lynch
“Were it not for David Lynch,” Cyrus asserts, “Miley would never have been Hannah Montana.”

On regretting Hannah Montana
“I hate to say it, but yes, I do. Yeah. I’d take it back in a second. For my family to be here and just be everybody okay, safe and sound and happy and normal, would have been fantastic. Heck, yeah. I’d erase it all in a second if I could.”

Tuesday is starting off great. This interview makes me want to kill myself. All I can imagine is Billy Ray Cyrus sitting alone in the dark on his hundred acre Tennessee property playing the guitar and weeping as he reads Miley Cyrus gossip on the internet, every once in a while affixing his gaze on a partially loaded gun on the table next to him.