I'm President and He's Pardoned

With several of my friends featuring Friday specials on their blogs (games, words, and celebrities), I wondered what kind of special feature I could add. Let's try something called Presidential Pardons, shall we? Here's how I play--if I were President of the United States of Pop Culture, who would I pardon?

Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale

My choice is less than unique as my predecessor, Dennis Miller, has already given Stockdale his due, saying of him, "he's a brilliant, sensitive, courageous man. And yet he committed the one unpardonable sin in our culture: he was bad on television (1993)." But President Miller never pardoned him--officially--so today I am pardoning the 1992 Vice Presidential candidate for the Reform Party. A Vietnam war hero and POW, one of the Navy's most decorated men, and a former philosophy professor at Stanford.

He was given one week's notice before the 1992 VP debate where he famously asked, "Who am I? Why am I here?" before going radio silent when his hearing aid went out on him. A laughable sequence famously mocked by Phil Hartman on Saturday Night Live--it unfortunately labeled him a pariah in US Pop Culture. In another cruel twist of fate, he died of Alzheimer's disease in 2005.

So on this day in the year of our Lord, I pardon him of all crimes against the hip and ironic.