WAS MUHAMMAD ALI A REPUBLICAN?

Jack Cashill’s new book “Sucker Punch”, which reveals how Muhammad Ali found God and became a Republican….

Muhammad Ali was changing in ways that few people saw or chose to see. He traces his hour of enlightenment to “around 1983.” It was only then that he became a “true believer.” Always more honest than the mythmakers around him, Ali sheds needed light here on his own reality. Before this moment, he confesses to biographer Tom Hauser, “I thought I was a true believer, but I wasn’t. I fit my religion to do what I wanted. I did things that were wrong, and chased women all the time.”

This should not have come as a shock. A majority of voters in 49 states – Massachusetts and New York included – voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984. An overwhelming majority of those Americans, like Ali, who both worshiped God and paid high taxes supported Reagan. In his devotion to God and in his avoidance of drink and drugs and even dance, Ali could have fit right in with the “Moral Majority.”

This turn of events “saddened” at least several of those who Hauser interviews. Andrew Young, U.N. Ambassador under Jimmy Carter, “bemoaned” Ali’s support for candidates “whose policies are harmful to the great majority of Americans, black and white.” Said Democrat activist Julian Bond at the time, “I don’t know why he’s doing it.”

Ali was a Republican, eh? I remain in the greastest of company in my conversion to conservatism!