Helms is dead

Have you helped fuck up New Jersey too?

I find it amazing I have to explain this.

1.

Here’s an ad Helms helped make for Willis Smith’s 1950 Senate campaign against Frank Graham:

White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.

2.

Another ad featured photographs Helms himself had doctored to illustrate the allegation that Graham’s wife had danced with a black man.

Then there’s his AIDS rhetoric.

If you agree with him on “quotas” that doesn’t change that he was racist, manipulative scum.

Appearing on “Larry King Live” in 1995, Jesse Helms, then the senior senator from North Carolina, fielded a call from an unusual admirer. Helms deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, the caller gushed, “for everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers.” Given the rank ugliness of the sentiment — the guest host, Robert Novak, called it, with considerable understatement, “politically incorrect” — Helms could only pause before responding. But the hesitation couldn’t suppress his gut instincts. “Whoops, well, thank you, I think,” he said.

Quite the champion you have there Fooey.

What are you going to do without him around to save you from the-made-entirely-of-straw LiberalMan, and his dark complected henchmen now?

With prodding from Novak, he added that he’d been spanked as a child for using the N-word and noted (with a delicious hint of uncertainty), “I don’t think I’ve used it since.” As for the caller’s main point — the virtue of keeping down blacks — it passed without comment.

Well, now we know why he hated them darkies soo much, and here I thought he was just an old school cynically retrograde race-baiting anachronism.

Helms was indeed one of (hopefully, the last of) the old racist senators who never even made an effort to hide it. I’m not convinced that someone as deeply racist for so much of their life as Byrd ever really can just turn that off, but at least Byrd has amended his actions in terms of how he votes, etc. which is what really counts - i.e. does it really matter if Byrd is racist if he is able to act as if he is not in his actions in the Senate? Helms, on the other hand, as far as I can tell, didn’t even feel the need to pretend he was not a racist.

I don’t celebrate his death, i.e. let he has not sinned cast the first stone, but the Senate is better off with him gone.

Yes, it’s been nice that he’s been gone from the Senate for the last six years.

Was he already out? Shows how closely I’ve watched him.

I think my first memory of anything Jesse Helms related was a cartoon in the usually more subtle Economist that was titled “The Mouth of the South” and had Helms’ face drawn into a naked fat man’s ass. Said it all, really.

Well put.

Well, he was elected. Does his long political career say more about him or the people in his constituency?

Respectfully

krise madsen

It says something about both, Mr. Madsen, and also about the electoral process.

Krise, it’s not as bad as all that. Helms had to run a scorced earth campaign every time to stay in office, was totally in the pocket of tobacco companies and get tons of campaign cash for it - but he never won with more than 53% of the vote.

“Totally in the pocket of tobacco companies” is a pretty silly criticism of someone running in North Carolina. Totally in the pocket of tobacco farmers and other people working in the tobacco industry in North Carolina – in other words in the pocket of a shitload of his constituents – would be a lot more accurate. The tobacco companies are not unpopular in tobacco country.

Absolutely! I helped elect a conservative Republican as mayor of Jersey City, a city of several hundred thousand people that I’m guessing has about something on the order of 10000 registered Republicans in it. And Mayor Brett Schundler, of course, promptly saved the city from economic disaster upon taking office and cleaned out the hive of crooks from the local Democratic machine that to this day is without doubt one of the most corrupt local political operations in the country. Brett’s actually coming back from a long hiatus to probably run again next year and he’ll probably win.

Thank G-d you saved the Northeast from the ills of Liberalism!

Thank God.

Thanks, God.

Then I don’t need a jacket!

Somehow I suspect the interesting of tobacco companies and their employees don’t overlap 100%. Regardless, my point was that he had tons and tons of money to bury his opponents in.

Jason, you don’t get emails from your employer exhorting you to vote in their interests? I sure do.

[LEFT]Jesse had tons of money because he was an absolute master fundraiser from individual contributions, not because of tobacco money. He was a pioneer in the 1970’s in developing the model of laboriously building up mailing lists of reliable financial supporters and then periodically hitting them with mass mailings on hot button issues to reliably raise tons of cash. Both parties copied his techniques and use them regularly to this day.
[/LEFT]