Muhammad Ali has passed away

Former World Heavyweight Boxing Champion Muhammad Ali has passed away as a result of a respiratory illness. He was 74 years old at the time of his death.

Since many people of my generation are largely or completely unfamiliar with who Ali was, I’ll describe who Ali was.

Ali, who was born Cassius Clay in Louisville, Kentucky in 1942, was one of the greatest athletes in the history of modern sports. As an amateur boxer, Ali won the gold medal in the light heavyweight division at the Games of the XVII Olympiad in Rome, Italy in 1960. Ali turned professional not long after his Olympic victory, and, in 1964, he won the World Heavyweight Championship by technical knockout (TKO) after Sonny Liston failed to answer the bell for the seventh round of the fight. Ali adopted the name Muhammad Ali not long after winning the title, and continued to win fight after fight.

Ali was a fighter, in and out of the ring. In addition to his legendary boxing ability in the ring, Ali was also famous for his opposition to the unjustified Vietnam War and the U.S. military draft for it. After being convicted of dodging the draft in 1967, Ali, a conscientious objector to military conflict, took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court and won; his conviction was overturned in 1971 by the nation’s highest court by unanimous decision, and Ali became a revered figure among those who sought to abolish the draft.

However, his suspension from boxing and the stripping of his world title lasted for over three years, and it wasn’t until 1970 that Ali returned to the ring. In 1971, Ali lost his first match as a professional against Joe Frazier, but Ali won the 1974 rematch against Frazier. In 1975, Ali regained his world title by knocking out George Foreman in a match dubbed The Rumble in the Jungle. Later that year, Ali won the Thrilla in Manilla against Frazier. Ali fought his last professional match in 1981, finishing his professional boxing career with a record of 56-5, with 37 of his wins by knockout (KO).

Ali was also famous for his speaking style, charisma, and his ability to grab the spotlight and own it. In fact, Ali was one of the few public figures in modern history to be able to effectively control and define his own public reputation. Ali turned trash-talking into a beautiful art form.

If one of Ali’s famous quotes could summarize him, it would be, “He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.”

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Hillary admires war hawks like Henry Kissinger and anti-LGBT bigots like Paul Wellstone

At the most recent Democratic presidential debate in Milwaukee, Hillary Clinton praised one of the most dangerous people in American history, Henry Kissinger, who was Richard Nixon’s right-hand man on foreign policy (Operation Menu was a U.S. carpet-bombing operation in Cambodia that Kissinger played a key role in). Nowadays, a carpet-bombing operation of any kind would be considered a war crime under international law. For someone like Hillary to praise someone like Kissinger is, in and of itself, proof that Hillary does not stand for the progressive values that the Democratic Party should stand for.

In recent days and weeks, Hillary has also praised the late Paul Wellstone, who represented Minnesota in the U.S. Senate for nearly two terms before his tragic death in a 2002 plane crash, was nearly a polar opposite of someone like Kissinger. In fact, Wellstone is someone that I admire, as he was progressive on nearly every political issue. However, he committed an unforgivable sin in 1996, when he voted for Bill Clinton’s Defense of Marriage Act, a bill designed to discriminate against LGBT  couples by denying federal recognition of same-sex marriages. For Hillary to praise someone like Wellstone and use Wellstone to attack Bernie Sanders for standing up to progressive values amounts to effectively defending Wellstone’s bigotry towards the LGBT community.

Hillary Clinton is running the most right-wing campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination since George Wallace in 1972.

President Obama just got this country into another Vietnam

In an official address to the nation, President Barack Obama announced that U.S. forces will carry out air strikes against Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants in Syria.

While President Obama promised that there will be no ground troops in Iraq or Syria, I seriously doubt that the president would hold to that promise for long. In fact, I think that the president just got this country into yet another Vietnam.

While I support humanitarian aid to those fleeing ISIS’s wrath and counterterrorism efforts to prevent ISIS from pulling off a terrorist attack on U.S. soil (so as long as said counterterrorism efforts don’t violate the U.S. Constitution), any kind of war with ISIS, whether it be an air war, a ground war, or a combination of both, is, more than likely, going to bog this country down in another long, drawn-out war, similar to the Vietnam War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I firmly believe that ISIS is an extremely dangerous organization that intends, through violence, to destroy everything they consider a enemy, including the United States of America, in fact, they are the most extreme Islamic fundamentalist organization that I’ve ever seen in my life. However, the U.S. becoming involved in a war with ISIS would, more than likely, be a big mistake.