He didn’t invent the drug to cure cancer.  He didn’t bequeath the theory of relativity to mankind.  He didn’t orchestrate a peace treaty between the Have people and the Have-Not crowds.  He wasn’t a king, prime minister, or even the squadron commander of a medium-successful tactical Air Force unit that successfully targeted and dispatched top ISIS commandos.

Ex-presidents and current White House occupants…weighed in.  The liberal candidates for office of the president scurried to memorialize this 6’3”, 236-lb. ring behemoth.  Every talk show horribilized and terribilized his passing.  The Grey Lady herself, the New York Times, gave over half of Saturday’s front page to the death of this legend.

Muhammad Ali, né Cassius Marcellus Clay in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1942, died on June 4, 2016, after a long and humbling battle with Parkinson’s and perhaps other disorders assailing a three-time heavyweight boxing champion.

The death of this amusing and colorful heavyweight boxer temporarily stopped the hemorrhage of ink and blah-blah that has defined our political campaign for president of these United States for months on end.

And you know what?  It’s over the top.  It’s embarrassing, overdone, and absurdly too much.  Golden Gloves.  Rome summer Olympics at 18.  Liston.  Patterson.  Frazier.  Cruel nicknames.  Taunting his opponents before, during, and after fights.  But by the time of the 1964 Civil Rights ferment, he was decidedly anti-Establishment, tried and punished for his militancy against the military.  He lost three peak performance years, his worldwide fans hungering for his return.

We saw faded pictures of Ali stuck onto the walls of mud and straw huts in a dozen countries, in Asia no less than South America and Africa, years after he was no longer in the limelight.  He was easy to like, not a complicated intellectual or an astringent egghead.  He was the property of all beamish sportsmen.  Especially when boxing was Big.

Ali/Clay was a famous athlete, a light-on-his-feet dandy in the ring, besting his many dreadnaught opponents not only in the feint-and-flail, kick-and-pummel game of boxing, but also in his lyrical poetry, his out-and-out delight in his own prowess and good looks (“I’m so pretty!”), and his unabashed self-promotion and crowing about his own indomitability.

Often provocative and outlandish, he changed his name and his religious affiliation after hanging out with the likes of Malcolm X.  He wasn’t so much admired for that.  But when he objected, on peculiar grounds, to serving in the armed forces in the Vietnam War, the libs sat up and took notice.

Here was a man who was droll on the mat to the ref and the newsies.  But he was also a man to spit in the face of the U.S. government, refusing to serve.  Elvis served, doing his duty to a country that had made him rich and famous beyond measure and Tupelo, Miss.

But this was different.  Every act done by Ali after his initial truculent resistance of serving his country was another clink in the bank of affronting The Man.  He never stopped to wonder that this terrific new faith he adopted, abandoning what he called his “slave name” of Cassius Clay, was and remains extremely hostile to blacks, as a lightning scan of Sudan’s appalling treatment of her indigenous animists, Christians, and non-Muslim blacks has shown, though they rarely get the press that Israel reaps when she defends a kindergarten from mortars being rained down on three-year-old Israeli kids.

He never asked or heard that the very Arabic term for blacks, whether African-Americans or Tajiki natives, is ebed.  That translates, quite pungently, to “slave.”

But in life he was graceful, fast, light on his feet for such a big man, funny, endearing, even through his constant Megillah of narcissism and self-approbation.

Disclosure: The closest I came to him was hand-delivering some important documents to the apartment of his mock bromance partner, the inimitable Howard Cosell, when I worked for a top TV personality.

So this gadabout comfort food for people desperate to admire diversity and elect a suitable candidate to hall of fame-ism became orgasmic at the name change, though it was, curiously, the very opposite of what he thought it represented.

No, the self-flagellating liberals had their chosen baby, and he was adorable: arrogant, self-possessed, a winner, braggart, narcissist, fast of tongue and feet.  (Whom does this litany of traits remind one of today…do we need to spell out the parallels?  But the media pooh-bahs loathe the white guy who manifests the same menu of ego and massive confidence as their now dead hero.)

The man was a delight for the worshipers of P.C., though he hasn’t really done much of late, courtesy his inability to speak pretty, or at all, as he once did, for the cameras and mics.

He’s the best sort of hero, since he did not need to prove anything beyond just derogating the America the libs love to spurn.  He made gestures to be an ambassador, sort of, for peace.  He was a supporter of President Reagan and was a civic volunteer in many a circumstance, even holding the Olympic torch late in his career.  But the adoring public didn’t care whether what he attempted fell flat and accomplished nothing.  He loved “all people,” his assigns say.  He smacked people around on the boards but was an avatar, we are told endlessly, for peace.

Every talking head, on every Sunday show, gushed at his amazing feats of accomplishment, as each speaker ascribed to Ali what they wanted to see in his acts.  Saying he was “pretty” – the adorational cadres interpreted that as early “black is beautiful.”  But it wasn’t – Ali just liked to remind the world, and women with red hair, how attractive he was.

As with the unknown and still largely hologramic current #44 in the sancta of 1600 Pennsylvania, he fit the bill for liberal/progressive palimpsest.  He’s black!  He’s pretty!  He hates the U.S. government!  And he converted to Islam before the fetish for admiring and instantaneously forgiving those who massacre others for not covering their women in black garbage bags after they have mutilated their genitalia lest they stray from their masters/husbands.

(Mere weeks after the election of a Muslim mayor in the U.K., dozens of mosques have set out new regs for their communities: women cannot go out of their homes without a chaperone and the permission of their husbands.  Women cannot have Facebook accounts (“evil” according to these brilliant lights of jurisprudence and mores) and may no longer wear trousers (which hint at the bodies underneath).  England.  In the second decade of the 21st century.)

The liberal establishment and counter-cultural cured-in-formaldehyde were well served by Ali’s tropisms and missteps, interpreting every micro-millimeter as a glorious triumph for all that sends them into rapture and exaltations of unself-conscious sanctimony.  Woe!  They have lost their star quarterback.  Who will ferry that pigskin over the threshold for them now?  Where now will they find a new hero with whom to apostrophize and beat the rest of us?

It’s close to fetish porn.  The undue ruckus, despite the talent and uniqueness of this splendid, boisterous boxer, still seems yet another example of the indecent, and the ultimately provocative – the coin of societal excess.