Apparently our double agent of change President Obama, invoked Muhammad Ali as a model of courage for staying the course just days before declaring a redoubled Pox Americana on the peoples of Afghanistan and Pakistan. I’m glad sports historian Dave Zirin has spoken swiftly to forbid Obama’s defiling of the most famous draft resister in US history. Parkinson’s prevents Ali from defending his title, just as MLK’s memorializers airbrush King’s antiwar vehemence.

Zirin references this infamously principled quote which led to Ali’s suspension from boxing, but ultimate vindication by the US Supreme Court:
 

“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end.

I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here….. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people, they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.”

He also said: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong … They never called me nigger.”

President Obama’s attempt to co-opt the character of Muhammad Ali is a disgrace. I suppose this suggests that Obama will accept his Nobel Peace Prize with not the least sense of irony or shame.