Thoughts on Impeachment(s)
Knew I had to write about the impeachment farce, now that the Dems were determined to try it again. So I spent a good part of the night looking up Ali fights. When you’re the GOAT, people go looking for your moments of weakness. Tom Brady has lost Super Bowls, three times, which ties him with Fran Tarkenton and John Elway for second most SB losses. You see how that works. So I went looking for Ali knockouts (0), knockdowns (2), and fights that went the distance he nevertheless won. Just three caught my attention, of which my encyclopedic knowledge of Ali remembered only one. Chuck Wepner, the game barroom brawler, made Ali hit the floor by stepping on his foot and then knocking him over (see above pic). The ref caught it right away, so blatant was the tactic, though not soon enough to prevent Sly Stallone from getting the idea for Rocky. Sad. There were other fights that didn’t end in KOs or TKOs. Two with the Brit/Aussie Joe Bugner, who got the crap beaten out of him but never went down, George Chuvalo who was a kind of human punching bag who never ever went down, and then there was the curious case of Oscar Bonavena. Which I watched 15 rounds of on Youtube, not because Ali was losing — he wasn’t — but because Howard Cosell was flagrantly throwing the call of the fight to Bonavena. “This isn’t the Ali we saw before the three and a half year layoff. He’s a different fighter, a lesser fighter.” That was Cosell’s refrain for round after round after round as Ali racked up points and generally loafed around the ring.
It made me sick enough of the narrative, knowing what I knew of the glories still to come, that I kept watching. Cosell’s companion in the booth was Yancy Durham, Joe Frazier’s manager, who was walking a tightrope. He was obviously pitching a blockbuster Ali-Frazier title fight between his champ and a hopefully still rusty Ali, so he kept pointing out that Ali was clearly winning the fight, though he chimed in happily on observations that Ali had lost something in his years out of the ring. All of which meant that the broadcast was itself a kind of fight promotion for the inevitable Ali-Frazier confrontation, NOT an objective report. It never seemed to occur to Cosell that after a brief tuneup fight with Jerry Quarry, Angelo Dundee might have wanted proof that his long benched fighter could go a full 15 rounds without tiring. Because it was pretty certain he’d have to be ready for 15 rounds against Frazier. But forget all that. I watched. Ali was at 80 percent of himself.
If he had a weakness, it was for the blunderers and backwards fighters. Ken Norton gave him trouble because he was left handed, which put Ali off his rhythm. Wepner was an unskilled brawler. Bugner was a semi-skilled tough guy, whom Ali came to admire for his courage and perseverance in a losing cause. Bugner was also the only fighter who seemed to make Ali look diminutive in the ring, towering over the 6’3” Ali even in a crouch. But Bonavena was just a ham and eggs sparring partner kind of guy, and his only edge on Ali was that he was boring as an opponent. Ali didn’t seem to regard him as a challenge, just an unexpectedly stubborn obstacle. Which is why we got the constant flow of drivel from Howard and Yancy all the way to the 15th round, when this happened:
Donald Trump’s legal team just wiped the Senate floor with the Democratic members of Congress seeking to impeach the former president after forcing them, on the fourth day of Trump’s trial, to view a slew of videos of their past violent rhetoric calling for their supporters to “fight” and encouraging the summer 2020 rioters.
The legal team opened with a video of all the times politicians and journalists suggested they wanted to impeach Trump, long before his first trial at the beginning of 2020, and transitioned into another series of clips depicting some of the same politicians such as Rep. Maxine Waters, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, failed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and others calling for violence against Trump and his supporters over the last four years.
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