Jesse Helms: Still a Fool

I thought he was talking about the WWF. Oh hang on, that's Jesse Ventura.

The man is evil, not foolish.

Jesse Helms dead at 86

We need a statement from Bono.

I celebrate our independence from this man.

I don't even wanna GLANCE at you-know-where.

http://umtailgate.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/Celebration%2C_Brooklyn_Bridge%2C_New_York_City.jpg

I don't even wanna GLANCE at you-know-where.

I'm just waiting for the day when Rush Limbaugh crucifies himself wrapped up in an American flag saying Reagan died for our sins, really.

Dead on the Fourth of July

I'm with Shakey

Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker noted in his memoirs that Helms had "the 'humorous habit'" of calling all black people "Fred".

from wikipedia

asshole was my senator from age 2-13 fuck him 4real

After Carol Mosely-Braun (D.-Ill.), the only African-American senator, defeated a bill that would have extended a federal patent on a Confederate flag insignia, Pat Buchanan accused her of "putting on an act" by linking the Confederacy to slavery. "The War Between the States was about independence, about self-determination," Buchanan asserted (New York Post, 7/28/93). "How long is this endless groveling before every cry of 'racism' going to continue before the whole country collectively throws up?"

Soon after the Senate vote on the Confederate flag insignia, Sen. Jesse Helms (R.-N.C.) ran into Mosely-Braun in a Capitol elevator. Helms turned to his friend, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R.-Utah), and said, "Watch me make her cry. I'm going to make her cry. I'm going to sing 'Dixie' until she cries." He then proceeded to sing the song about the good life during slavery to Mosely-Braun (Gannett News Service, 9/2/93; Time, 8/16/93).

On CNN's Larry King Live (9/15/95), when a caller praised guest Senator Jesse Helms for "everything you've done to help keep down the niggers," Helms replied, "Thank you, I think."

Helms' impeccable racist credentials include calling the University of North Carolina (UNC) the "University of Negroes and Communists." (Charleston Gazette, 9/15/95)

http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=15917

New evidence shows how far Jesse Helms went to support Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet

there's also the, um, charming anecdote (also on wikipedia) of helms whistling "dixie" on the Senate elevator in front of carol moseley-braun in an effort "to make her cry."

yeah, fuck him.

(whoops, i should've read ethan's post before posting that)

I thought he was already dead.

remember in '94 when he threatened the president's life?

Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker noted in his memoirs that Helms had "the 'humorous habit'" of calling all black people "Fred".

-- Eisbaer, Friday, July 4, 2008 12:29 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

is fred a common slur or just some helmsian eccentricity

lots of bullshit "let us all remember what a great man helms was" forthcoming over the next several days from not just the right-wingers but all over the media i'm sure.

As long as Mitch McConnell gets caught saying "Life would've been better had Jesse's ideas taken place!", I'm all for it.

"God must be dead if you're alive"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIyewCdXMzk

"You needed that job, and you were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority, because of a racial quota. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt says it is. Gantt supports Ted Kennedy's racial quota law that makes the color of your skin more important than your qualifications. Your vote on this issue next Tuesday. For racial quotas, Harvey Gantt. Against racial quotas, Jesse Helms."

is fred a common slur or just some helmsian eccentricity

-- jhøshea

where 'eccentricity' also means slur?

“Compromise, hell! ... If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?” Helms wrote in a 1959 editorial that foretold his political style.

one of the all-time greatest political bologna roll analogies.

no deez if jesse says it its not a slur for he is perfect rip lil buddy

fuck this dead white guy

gross

oh wait foxnews sez: No matter his positions, colleagues said he was always a gentleman.

No matter his positions

Appropriately phrased, somehow.

i thought it was very chivalric & diplomatic when he did that song & dance routine for carol mosley braun in the elevator after she kicked his ass on a bill

the fact that the dude retired only because of health reasons, with "dignity" intact, in 2003(!) is a pretty damning indictment of the u.s. (or N.C at least).

I wonder if AIDS/HIV would have had a cure by now if Jesse Helms hadn't existed.

yah but then what if u found out the cure was made from HIS BLOOD

test

and then
there was a HOOK

anyway, this is the best possible thread title for the man beyond the grave. Thank you Rickey.

It's not often that Jesse Helms does something I approve of, but this last one may prove to be an exception to that rule. May he rest in peace. And stay that way.

Posted at 10:15am on Jul. 4, 2008
Jesse Helms 1921-2008
By Ben Domenech
Jesse Helms, a warrior for the conservative cause, passed away this morning.
Jesse Helms was a controversial figure to the American left, but he was beloved by his colleagues and by many of his ideological foes. Madeleine Albright kissed and danced with him. Joe Biden loved him. Elizabeth Edwards said her husband was just like him. Helms considered Bono a personal friend.
Helms in person was very unlike the caricature the left painted of him. He was strongly opposed to the United Nations and what he saw as encroachment on American liberty, and yet was one of the first Republicans to endorse a strong worldwide foreign aid policy on AIDS relief. He never graduated from college, and never shook off his lower class upbringing, but through hard work and commitment earned the respect of his friends, his colleagues and even his enemies.
Ever a fighter against the encroachment of bureaucracy and ever-expanding big government, Helms was an old school conservative in that regard. Once, when facing the prospect of a government shutdown, he is supposed to have said to his colleagues: ""Every day these buildings are closed, the Republic grows stronger." And he certainly believed it.
He was a warrior and a patriot. The date of his death is fitting indeed.
RIP.

photoshop request for helms in bear cavalcade pic right now thx

As Heritage’s Ed Feulner remarked today, “July 4, 2008, like July 4, 1826, and July 4, 1831, will long be remembered as a very special day in the history of American independence. On the Fourth of July 1826, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died. On the Fourth of July 1831, James Monroe died. On the Fourth of July 2008, another great American patriot, Jesse Helms, died.”

im impressed even tho he had a lower class birth he got people to respect him!

i knew that was gonna happen & is gonna happen like 6 thousand times between now & tuesday xp

http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/07/he_used_race_very_effectively

Dan Savage basically lays a full smackdown, non shocker

But it's worth it for the Daily Oklahoman debacle at the bottom. Trust me.

http://slog.thestranger.com/files/2008/07/jessefireworksjp5.jpg

http://www.unctv.org/senatorno/gallery/images/005.jpg

ill be lightin a sparkler 4 jesse 2 nite :(

I presume Domenech borrowed that obituary from somewhere else.

As an aide to the 1950 Senate campaign of North Carolina Republican candidate Willis Smith, Helms reportedly helped create attack ads against Smith’s opponent, including one which read: “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.” Another ad featured photographs Helms himself had doctored to illustrate the allegation that Graham’s wife had danced with a black man. (The News and Observer, 8/26/01; The New Republic, 6/19/95; The Observer, 5/5/96; Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms, by Ernest B. Furgurson, Norton, 1986)
The University of North Carolina was “the University of Negroes and Communists.” (Capital Times, 11/22/94) Black civil rights activists were “Communists and sex perverts.” (Copley News Service, 8/23/01)

Of civil rights protests Helms wrote, “The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that’s thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men’s rights.” (WRAL-TV commentary, 1963) He also wrote, “Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced.” (New York Times, 2/8/81)

http://i32.tinypic.com/1z3o2om.gif

actually, jesse is the funny dude with the little curl drooping down on his forehead. the old man in the center was his dad, jesse sr.

We need a statement from Bono.

-- Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Friday, July 4, 2008 3:29 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Link

It begins:

re: The Helms Ad [John J. Miller]

Roger: I just did an interview on Helms for a radio syndicate and the question of the ad came up, as I knew it would. Every obituary written by a liberal will mention it. But consider what the ad was about: racial preferences in hiring and college admissions. Liberals were (and are) for them. Helms was against them. He cut an emotional ad on the topic in a tight race against a black challenger. That was provocative, but it was hardly racist. In accusing Helms of racism over this ad, the Left is simply try to avoid a debate that it doesn't want to have. It would prefer to demonize those who disagree with its politically correct pieties. The alternative is making an argument as to why people should be judged by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.

i'm with everyone else who thought he died already. i guess I was thinking of strom thurmond.

actually, jesse is the funny dude with the little curl drooping down on his forehead. the old man in the center was his dad, jesse sr.

WhAtEvEr!!!!

Whoever the fuck John J. Miller is, he's full of shite. That ad did not say, "Do you want people of inferior character working beside you, regardless of the color of their skin?" He is talking out his ass when he says it wasn't racist. Shithead.

Hopefully, the Helms Dying effect will be as tarring as the Thurmond Dying effect i.e. politicians saying stupid shit, then effective ending their career.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd62dptmpBk

hey guess how I feel about this

hahahahahahahahaha

Shakey OTM

Jesse Helms: No Longer a Fool

btw he was white

Normally I feel sorry for the family when someone I dislike dies.

Normally.

http://www.unctv.org/senatorno/gallery/images/005.jpg

you will empathize with us, you understand me?

Haha I started this thread on my birthday!

Hay where is deeznuts to tell us all how off-base we are?

The comments under the NYT article announcing his death are LOL.

"My only regret is that he didn’t live till November when, God willing, a black man will be elected President of these United States. I would have loved to see him eat (Jim) Crow."

I didn't really know anything about this guy but fuck this guy. I esp love how much of a disgusting racist pig he was but he was happy to get money as a slum landlord from black families. Burn in hell you old shit.

shitBAAAAAAAAAAAG

You're too kind, Hoos.

Jesse's at amateur night at the Apollo now.

made my Independence Day.

http://www.citypaper.net/blogs/clog/2008/07/04/jesse-helms-dies-wikipedia-steps-right-in/

Death

He died on July 4, 2008, slitting his wrists in a washtub out back beneath the pecan tree and writing "I've been a bad boy" in his own blood. The skins of several children were found drying in his attic, swarms of horseflies going in and out of the eaves. His wife was quoted on CNN as saying "I always wondered about Jesse's collection of little shoes."

The "white hands" ad is race-baiting, which is to say that it's free of explicit racism and just invites the viewer to fill in the blanks with his or her own. Given that Helms said and did so many other things that were actually explicitly racist, it's annoying to see that ad continually brought up in the press as if that's his dark hour, since it's low on his list of anti-accomplishments (and just the sort of thing where a lot of people would justifiably fail to see what was so damnably racist about it and conclude that maybe Helms was being unfairly pilloried).

I take your point, but it's still pretty hard to miss the outright racism there, don't you think?

Ain't if your eyes are half-closed.

Nabisco's point is that the ad is too easy a rallying point for the haters.

Yeah, I get that = "I take your point." As noted above, it's not like anyone in the mainstream media is really gonna clobber this newly dead guy any more than it did Nixon.

lol Hitchens:

I make no apology for calling him a provincial redneck, because that, to be fair to him once more, was how he thought of himself and even described himself. It was a scandal that a man with so little knowledge of the outside world should have had such a stranglehold on American foreign policy for so long. He once introduced Benazir Bhutto as the prime minister of India. All right, that could have happened to anybody. But what about the hearings on North Korea in which he made repeated references to "Kim Jong the Second"? In order to prevent any repetition of this idiotic gaffe, Helms' staff propped up a piece of card on which was clearly written the pronunciation "Kim Jong ILL." The senator from North Carolina duly made the adjustment, referring thenceforth to the North Korean despot as "Kim Jong the Third."

I remember watching him at a hearing in the early 1980s, on the confirmation of Richard Burt as ambassador to Germany, and marveling that such a venomous hick could be in a position to block a treaty or to stall a nomination. To the delicacy of foreign relations, he brought all the sophistication of a crusader against "modern art."

'White Hands' gets brought up because it happened so late in the game. Jesse in 1959 was among peers, in 1984 that was some crazy shit.

1990!

Mark Allen remebers wrapping Jesse's house with a condom:

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2006/01/i_wrapped_a_gia.html