WASTELAND BAIT & TACKLE / James McMurtry

HAGLER VS. SUGAR RAY, BIDEN VS. PALIN

Don't give her any more room to dance.

Near as I can glean from YouTube, The Marvin Hagler/Sugar Ray Leonard fight took place on April 6th, 1987. No one I knew at that time could believe the outcome. It was supposed to be a bloodbath. Leonard was supposed to do the bleeding.  Hagler had over fifty KO's under his Middle Weight belt. Leonard, a pumped up Welter Weight, had twenty three. Somehow, Leonard won on points.

 A couple of months later, June nineteenth, or Juneteenth , as they say in Texas, anniversary of the day in 1865 that the Texas slaves were finally told they were free, I was hanging out backstage at the Navasota Blues Festival . My lady friend, at that time, was a real good interviewer and had secured an interview with Johnny Clyde Copeland, the headliner at that festival. She and I constituted two of the four white people in attendance. Navasota is a black town in a black East Texas county. Turned out, Copeland's manager made most of his money managing boxers out of Houston. The ranch on which the festival was held was owned by a boxing promoter. The talk back stage went from music to reefer to boxing. Johnny and his guys ribbed me for not being much into pot. I remember Johnny saying, "You got fifteen dollars, you need a hair cut and some reefer, which one you gonna buy? I know which one I'm gonna buy." None of them were at all surprised by the outcome of the Leonard/ Hagler fight. They knew how it had gone down. Johnny's manager explained it very slowly. Hagler's handlers had lost the fight for him long before the first bell. They had rolled over to the Leonard camp's requests for a larger ring and heavier gloves, thus giving more room for Leonard to dance, and taking the sting out of Hagler's punch.

And now the Democrats have agreed to treat Sarah Palin with heavier, softer gloves. The Vice Presidential debates are to be question/answer, not debates at all. YOU MORONS. Palin is deadly when she has a script. Without a script, she's a Valley girl on St. Joseph's Baby Acid, unable to put together a sentence even worthy of Dubya. Had you "vetted" her any better than McCain did, you would have known this long before Katie Couric chased her back into the shadows from which she will only emerge, fleetingly, trout like, to snatch the occasional choice fly off the surface before the election. You are afraid to be accused of roughing up a woman. She's not a woman, you idiots, she's a candidate, and a very dangerous one. She's dangerous because she so . . . so . . . stupid, and she will be President if McCain is elected. McCain is about a million years old and has had four malignant melanomas, the most dangerous type of cancer. It will recur and it will kill him. The stress of the oval office would not be likely to postpone the inevitable.

I can't say I know Palin's personal beliefs, but fundamentalist Christians tend not to differentiate between acts of man and acts of God. They tend to see acts of man as acts of God through man. Man made global warming is just God's plan.  This world doesn't matter anyway. Jews are to be resettled in Israel, so they can die. Democrats are willing to let Palin get her hands on the Armageddon switch rather than risk being seen as bullies. YOU MORONS.

Singer-songwriter James McMurtry lives in Austin, Texas. When he's not touring, you can see him at the Continental Club every Wednesday, ‘round about midnight. His latest album, Just Us Kids, is out now on Lightning Rod Records.