Agreed. And even worse, it's undoing the policy they were accepting despite it's effect of neurodivergent people only because a political insider has a relative it effects and made a righteous spectacle of political process.

I'm guessing Stackhouse is supposed to be Paul Wellstone since in the episode mentions that he's from Minnesota and is a haranguing 'pain in the ass' of Bartlet who they frequently dismiss for outdated lefty grievances.

If so, then the real life counterpart, Wellstone, didn't get a triumphant send off on the Senate floor. The small plane he, his wife, kid, and aides were travelling in crashed after he become a prominent opponent of the Iraq war in 2002 and the Senate majority hung in the balance of his re-election.

brace-dark-cowboy Unfortunately he didn't follow the rules.

[–] SacredExcrement@hexbear.net 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Never heard of Wellstone; crash doesn't seem overtly suspect, but there were some things that caught my eye

Wellstone had been receiving death threats since he took office; the FBI tapped his phone to locate the callers...Government documents also indicated that the FBI had been following Wellstone before he became a senator, and included records dating as far back as his arrest at a 1970 antiwar protest.

(NTSB) later determined that the crash's likely cause was "the flight crew's failure to maintain adequate airspeed, which led to an aerodynamic stall from which they did not recover".

There was a problem with the airport's VHF omnidirectional range (VOR) navigational beacon. According to Minnesota Public Radio: The day after the crash, FAA pilots tested the VOR. The inspection pilots reported to the NTSB that when they flew the approach without their automatic pilot engaged, the VOR repeatedly brought them about a mile south of the airport.

Other pilots at the charter company told NTSB that pilot Richard Conry and first officer (co-pilot) Michael Guess had both displayed below-average flying skills.

So he was being piloted to an airport with a faulty VOR beacon by two bad pilots; a reach could be that the faulty beacon was not an 'accident', and that those two were picked to fly him in hopes that between the beacon and poor pilots this would happen, but seems a stretch. Crash was determined to also be due to the aircraft stalling due to low airspeed; this pilot was known to let the copilots actually do the flying, and this copilot here was known for easing up on the throttle to the point of almost stalling

[–] MolotovHalfEmpty@hexbear.net 8 points 3 days ago

I meant more that a man in his position should have lived by the True Anon rules than the idea that he was definitely murdered. It was convenient for a lot of the political class after the fact though. Interesting context though, I never looked into it at the time, just remember the news.