re: #138 HappyWarrior

Yeah my mom’s uncle voted for him because of NAFTA I believe. Stockdale at least wasn’t Pence though.

Now you’ve done it! Jim Stockdale not only wasn’t Pence, he was head and shoulders above most of the political riffraff of both his time and today. When the media made him into a joke, that was a turning point for me. He was a POW for 7-1/2 years, led the prisoner resistance in the Hanoi Hilton.

Tortured routinely and denied medical attention for the severely damaged leg he suffered during capture, Stockdale created and enforced a code of conduct for all prisoners which governed torture, secret communications, and behavior. In the summer of 1969, he was locked in leg irons in a bath stall and routinely tortured and beaten. When told by his captors that he was to be paraded in public, Stockdale slit his scalp with a razor to purposely disfigure himself so that his captors could not use him as propaganda. When they covered his head with a hat, he beat himself with a stool until his face was swollen beyond recognition. When Stockdale was discovered with information that could implicate his friends’ “black activities”, he slit his wrists so they could not torture him into confession

But because he couldn’t hear the debate questions (because they had fucked up his ears in the prison) it was all a big laugh riot.

I had read his and his wife’s book “In Love and War” well before Perot picked him, and I thought he was such an incredible person, it just made me sick to have him laughed at.

OK—stepping off my soapbox for now.