Racist Scum Helms Does World Favor...

[FSTargetDrone]

...by dying:

Conservative icon Jesse Helms dead at 86
Jesse Helms

Posted: 38 minutes ago
Updated: 1 minute ago

Raleigh, N.C. — Jesse Helms, the firebrand U.S. senator whose outspoken, conservative views polarized North Carolina and U.S. voters for decades, died at 1:15 a.m. Friday in Raleigh, according to John Dodd, president of the Jesse Helms Center.

He was 86. His cause of death was not released. Funeral arrangements will be forthcoming, Dodd said.

Helms served five terms in the U.S. Senate, retiring in 2003 because of his faltering health. During his 30 years in Capitol Hill, the North Carolina Republican became a powerful voice for a conservative movement that was growing both in Congress and across the country, and he used his position to speak out against issues like gay rights, federal funding for the arts and U.S. foreign aid.

...

Divisive politics

His views on race relations – he opposed a national holiday honoring slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., led a filibuster against the extension of the Voting Rights Act and called some young blacks "Negro hoodlums" – and social issues sharply divided the public into those who viewed him as a champion of the common man and those who thought of him as a narrow-minded bigot.

David Broder, a widely respected political columnist for The Washington Post, called Helms "the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country."

"What is unique about Helms – and from my viewpoint, unforgivable – is his willingness to pick at the scab of the great wound of American history, the legacy of slavery and segregation, and to inflame racial resentment against African Americans," Broder wrote shortly after Helms announced that he wouldn't seek re-election in 2002.

Helms acknowledged his polarizing character, saying famed ventriloquist dummy Mortimer Snerd could run as the Democratic candidate for Senate against him and garner 45 percent of the vote.

"I wasn't interested in a popularity contest and surely didn't care about anything the big newspapers called me," he said. "I saw how they constantly ridiculed conservative ideas and conservative people."

...

Move to the right

Helms' role as standard bearer for the conservative movement is his most lasting legacy in state and national politics. His switch to the Republican Party in 1970 paved the way for many politicians across North Carolina to follow suit, eventually ending decades of one-party control in state and local government.

After the Watergate scandal, he jumped into the GOP vacuum in Washington and began to reshape the Republican Party in his conservative image. With a cadre of young, bright activists at his side, he formed a the National Congressional Club and other committees across the country, soliciting small donations through direct-mail pitches to thousands of people and creating a fundraising machine for the conservative cause and GOP candidates.

The machine helped oust North Carolina Democrats Robert Morgan and Terry Sanford from the U.S. Senate, replacing them with conservative Republicans John East and Lauch Faircloth, respectively.

"We'll never forget how he battled, especially during those first lonely years, to protect our liberties, preserve our family values and keep America strong. There he was, standing day after day to a government Goliath, crying out like a voice in the wilderness," former President Ronald Reagan said in a 1983 speech. "Bit by bit, he became more than a lonely crusader. He grew into a lionhearted leader of a great and growing army."

Many political observers credit Helms' support for catapulting Reagan to the presidency in 1980 and accelerating the conservative agenda – cutting taxes at home, fighting communism abroad and opposing many government social programs – at the national level. He also served as Reagan's right flank for years, allowing the president to make political compromises as needed. "(I decided to) stay to the right of the president's right and make it easier for Reagan to be Reagan," Helms wrote in his memoir.

Holding down the far right of U.S. politics made Helms a foil for the media and liberal activists in a growing culture war as the conservative movement expanded. He was so outspoken in his opposition to art he considered offensive, federal funding for AIDS research and women's issues like legalized abortion that he helped Democrats millions of dollars to support candidates who backed those causes.

"Most North Carolinians are not as conservative as Jesse Helms," state Sen. Paul Luebke, D-Durham, said in a 1995 interview. "But by presenting himself as a man of courage, willing to stand up against 'tax-and-spend liberals,' homosexuality and so forth, Helms commands respect."

[Pelranius]

Lets see, first Thurmond, now Helms. Who's the next old dinosaur to be sent off?

[Illuminatus Primus]

North Carolinians are by-and-large ignorant Southern garbage? Check.

[MKSheppard]

Lets see, first Thurmond, now Helms. Who's the next old dinosaur to be sent off?

Robert Byrd?

[Gandalf]

So, will his replacement be any better? Or will it be another wanker with a few more years left?

Lets see, first Thurmond, now Helms. Who's the next old dinosaur to be sent off?

Robert Byrd?

He's like a Soviet Premier; Dead for a few years, but nobody's noticed.

[Glocksman]

Byrd as Brezhnev?
Maybe the next pork barrel project in WV will be named the 'Robert E Brezhnev Bridge' or the 'Leonid Ilyich Byrd Federal Building'.

[Raw Shark]

If Jesse don't like it, it's no good
get it out of our museums, out of my neighborhood!
Jesse's favorite painting is the one of the clown,
with a daisy in his hand and a tear a-rollin' down...

[LadyTevar]

So, will his replacement be any better? Or will it be another wanker with a few more years left?

Lets see, first Thurmond, now Helms. Who's the next old dinosaur to be sent off?

Robert Byrd?

He's like a Soviet Premier; Dead for a few years, but nobody's noticed.

We'd vote for him anyway.

[Gil Hamilton]

Robert Byrd?

He'll still be the Senator from West Virginia 1000 years from now, though, granted, he'll be a Futurama-style head in a jar or be some sort of cyborg, constructed at the Robert E. Byrd Medica Mechanica Plant.

[Patrick Degan]

To quote one of Bill Maher's New Rules: sometimes, death isn't a tragedy.

[Pelranius]

Lets see, first Thurmond, now Helms. Who's the next old dinosaur to be sent off?

Robert Byrd?

I was going to suggest him but since the last two have been southerners, we should give the rest of the nation a chance to contribute.

[MichaelFerrariF1]

Lets see, first Thurmond, now Helms. Who's the next old dinosaur to be sent off?

Robert Byrd?

I was going to suggest him but since the last two have been southerners, we should give the rest of the nation a chance to contribute.

WV was a Union state. I think it's time for "KKKing of Pork" Byrd to kick the bucket.

[Coriolis]

You will not believe the circle jerk they had in the paper today (I live in NC). Everyone was tripping over themselves to honor this guy

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

He was also said to be an "anti-communist" firebrand. Did he champion any witch hunts? Or did he lead them in the front?

[Pelranius]

My guess is that he was too worked up about black people getting seats on buses or going to school. To be fair to the guy, it's hard living in the 14th century when everyone else is enjoying the benefits of civilization, including education.

[Glocksman]

I read his book (really a collection of essays) 'When Free Men Shall Stand' back in high school, and IIRC it contained a mix of spot on critiques of US policies (budget deficits and congressional irresponsibility) and totally whackjob crypto-racist slams on integration via school busing.

Helms wasn't totally bad, but then again Hitler built the autobahns.

[Elfdart]

I wasn't going to do anything special for July 4th since I'm not exactly proud of this country anymore and see nothing worth celebrating. Then I heard Jesse the Hutt had kicked the bucket...



The flames of hell will burn just a little brighter now that a big pile of rancid fatback named Jesse Helms has been tossed on the fire down below.

The difference between Helms and Robert Byrd or even George Wallace is that some racist old crackers either changed their ways or at least learned the good taste to not be a bigoted fucktard in public. As late as 1995 Jesse the Hutt was still calling the University of North Carolina (UNC) the "University of Negroes and Communists". He was an unrepentant white supremacist, gay-baiting douchecock and his funeral is one that would actually deserve the loving attention of Fred Phelps' inbred hecklers.

[Elfdart]

Here's a joke I came up with back in 1990, which I used to zing the local right-wing radio host with:

Q: Do you know what the difference is between David Duke and Jesse Helms?

A: Neither do I.

or

A: about 200,000 votes



Some wiseguy posted this on Helms' wikipedia page:

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."

[Jade Falcon]

Please let Fred Phelps be the next one...

[MichaelFerrariF1]

The difference between Helms and Robert Byrd or even George Wallace is that some racist old crackers either changed their ways or at least learned the good taste to not be a bigoted fucktard in public.

I don't know about Byrd changing his ways. Every now and then his tongue slips and we hear "white ni**ers."

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

Guardian Obituary: Jesse Helms

Senator Jesse Helms, member of the US Senate's foreign relations committee for two decades and its chairman from 1995 to 2001, has died at the age of 86. To echo this newspaper's memorable comment on the death of William Randolph Hearst, it is hard even now to think of him with charity. From his earliest years, Helms's attitudes recalled those of an earlier southern bigot, Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, who so outraged his Senate colleagues, that they eventually refused even to let him take his seat.

There was never a comparable risk for Helms, who maintained an old-world courtesy in his personal contacts. But that was only on the surface. He became one of the most powerful and baleful influences on American foreign policy, repeatedly preventing his country paying its UN contributions, voting against virtually all arms control measures, opposing international aid programmes as "pouring money down foreign rat holes", and avidly supporting military juntas in Latin America and minority white regimes in Southern Africa.

In domestic politics he denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as "the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress", voted against a supreme court justice because she was "likely to uphold the homosexual agenda", acted for years as spokesman for the large tobacco companies, was reprimanded by the justice department and the federal election commission for electoral malpractice, and compiled a dismal personal record as a slum landlord.

The irony was that he was often seen as a relative moderate in his home state of North Carolina. His views sprang directly from his background as the son of the police chief in the small town of Monroe. Even before the Depression, life there was a constant struggle. It produced generations of deeply conservative poor whites, steeped in jingoistic patriotism and fundamentalist religion, who regarded the surrounding black population as barely part of the human race.

Helms was educated at local schools and had just enrolled for a college course when America entered the second world war. In 1942, he joined the navy, to be given a role which inadvertently established his postwar career. As a recruiting officer, he had to make regular patriotic appeals on local radio. They brought him sufficient recognition after the war to abandon his college studies for journalism, initially as news editor of the Raleigh Times and later as director of news and programmes for the principal local radio network.

In 1960, he was given an extraordinary boost when the owner of the main local television station appointed him one of the new medium's first editorial commentators. For 12 years, Helms appeared nightly at peak viewing time to denounce the civil rights struggle, trade unions, the UN, Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty, hippies, and any other social or political development rejected by the extreme right. His commentaries were repeated by 70 southern radio stations and, as they became increasingly popular, reprinted in 200 newspapers across America.

In a climate well to the right of mainstream politics in Europe, Helms became extraordinarily influential among those Americans Richard Nixon dubbed the silent majority. At the same time he built up a solid political network in North Carolina, working for several conservative senators, serving on Raleigh town council, running the state's bankers' association, and joining the Masons, their associates the Shriners, and the Rotarians.

By the time the Republican Richard Nixon moved into the White House in 1969, Helms's political ambitions had been focused. In 1972, in a state that had voted solidly Democratic since the civil war, he stood for the Senate as a Republican. In a bitter campaign against a middle-of-the-road opponent, Helms won by 8%. It was a signal of the South's seismic political shift after years of Democratic desegregation. It also made Helms the first North Carolina Republican to sit in the US senate for nearly 80 years.

His initial ambition was to secure his place on the agriculture committee, where he could push the interests of the powerful tobacco lobby for which he had worked for years. But, in a move which proved a stroke of near-genius at a time when direct-mail was in its infancy, he and two close associates organised a postal campaign for a body they named "the National Congressional Club". The repeated arrival of impressive-looking letters signed by Helms and denouncing school busing, funding for the arts, compensation for Japanese-Americans, the Red menace, and umpteen other liberal causes, sparked a stunning national response.

His allegations were often mind-numbingly bizarre. "Your tax dollars are being used," he claimed in one letter, "to pay for grade school classes that teach our children that cannibalism, wife-swapping, and the murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behaviour." But his rhetoric convinced millions of Americans and, invited to save the nation by donating a dollar, they did just that. A river of cash poured into the club.

What happened to it all remained a constant mystery and, as the rules on election finances were slowly tightened, the club's accounts grew ever fuzzier. Some cash certainly went to the Coalition of Freedom, which had Helms as its honorary chairman until federal tax authorities began investigating its illegal campaign activities.

More than $800,000 went to a firm called Jefferson Marketing. Then the election commission established that this company was inseparable from the club, making its electoral operations unlawful. Less traceable were donations to other conservative groups and to fundamentalist religious figures like Jerry Falwell.

What is beyond question is the malign impact of Helms's innovation on all subsequent American politics. He inaugurated the age of massive back-door political donations, now euphemistically known as "soft money". In his own 1984 re-election battle, he spent $16.5m, then the most expensive Senate campaign in American history (and the federal election commission twice penalised him for using illegal contributions). Sixteen years later, a New Jersey candidate would lavish $60m on gaining a Senate seat, making it evident how effectively Helms's initiative had opened political office to the highest bidder.

It had also bankrolled the rise of the religious right and its effective takeover of the Republican party. That in turn polarised the entire American electorate, as the results in 2000 so dramatically demonstrated.

With Helms's agenda moving into the political mainstream — opposition to abortion, gun control, foreign entanglements, multicultralism, social welfare, educational reform and a host of other liberal policies — millions of voters dropped out and the rest divided evenly into mutually hostile camps.

For all his political posturing, however, Helms repeatedly showed himself inept at the tedious business of shepherding legislation through Congress.

The Senate's tradition of choosing committee chairmen by seniority eventually brought him to head the agriculture committee (1981-87). It should have been an enviable chance to promote North Carolina's farming and tobacco interests, which employ half its people. Yet the state, ranked eleventh by population, had one of the nation's highest poverty rates and lowest levels of federal funding.

Helms contributed his share to this misery with his ownership of rented houses in poor black districts of Raleigh. Some tenants reported that his properties had been without adequate heating for 30 years. The city's building inspectors repeatedly issued summonses against Helms to remedy a wide range of dilapidations, from rotting floors to leaking pipes.

Helms's principal skill, in fact, was obstruction, which he employed ruthlessly once he assumed chairmanship of the foreign relations committee in 1995, having been a member since 1981. The Senate's arcane rule book offers virtually uncontrollable power to committee chairmen to determine their own agenda. In a private war with the state department, Helms refused to hold confirmation hearings for 18 new ambassadors, or to debate such key issues for the Clinton administration as the chemical weapons or strategic arms treaties.

He cut the state department's funds by $1,700m until the administration finally agreed to his reorganization proposals, abolishing the arms control and information services and placing new restrictions on the US aid agency. In 1996, he caused an international furore by joining forces with Congressman Dan Burton of Indiana to push through the Helms-Burton Act, extending American jurisdiction to international companies trading with Cuba.

But continued Republican control of the Senate meant that Helms could not be ignored. He established a Jesse Helms Centre in his home town of Wingate, at which American and foreign dignitaries could pay homage. Those unable to attend in person could demonstrate their goodwill in cash: Taiwan donated $225,000, Kuwait $100,000, and various tobacco companies more than $1m.

Former president Jimmy Carter, secretary of state Madeleine Albright, Dr Henry Kissinger, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and other key public figures all turned up. Eventually even the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, heeded the call: in the aftermath of his visit, the foreign relations committee suddenly released America's long-outstanding payments to the UN.

In later years, Helms suffered from increasingly poor health. He contracted prostate cancer and a bone disorder, Paget's disease, which obliged him to travel round the Senate building on a scooter. He also underwent a quadruple heart bypass.

Helms finally lost his chairmanship of the foreign relations committee when the moderate Vermont Republican Senator James Jeffords, lost patience with the Bush administration in May 2001. His defection to the Democrats secured their control of the Senate and of all its legislative committees.

This sudden loss of power, allied to his failing health, at last convinced Helms that it was time to give up. In August that year, he announced he would not run again when his term expired in 2002.

Though there was dismay in North Carolina, his decision was greeted with relief by most of the country. The New York Times observed: "Few senators in the modern era have done more to resist the tide of progress," and Robert Pastor, whose ambassadorship to Panama was scuppered by Helms in 1995, commented that, "nothing Jesse Helms did in his entire career will enhance America's national security more than his retirement."

He is survived by his wife Dorothy, two daughters and a son.

• Jesse Helms, politician, born October 18 1921; died July 4 2008

GG no re, Guardian. Gratz on calling a spade a spade!

[Elfdart]

Just for a cheap laugh, I buzzed by the Republitard sites and you'd think a Saint had just croaked.


I spent part of my childhood in North Carolina, so I'm very familiar with this white supremacist scumbag whose only reason for not joining the Klan was probably because they couldn't find a white hood big enough to fit around his porcine jowls. But I found interesting this anecdote about what a vile piece of shit Jesse Helms was:

LINK

My first encounter with Jesse Helms came in the Delta Sigma Phi fraternity room at Duke University in 1966. That was the site of the closest television to my room, and Jesse Helms came on every weekday evening for a live commentary on Raleigh station WRAL.

"Listen to this guy if you have any question about what a redneck area this is," advised my friends. When Jesse sought corroboration for his reactionary thoughts he called "Cousin Chub" Seawell into the studio. Seawell's folksiness was more entertaining than Helms' often bitter diatribes, but the message came out pretty much the same. We watched them assail everything we believed in.

Sometimes we laughed; sometimes we became infuriated. Always we looked down on them. We derided them as they derided us. Never did we take them seriously, except as examples of the narrow backwardness that summoned us to become liberal instruments of enlightenment.

I was a senior when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. Roughly 2,000 of us joined a vigil on the quad for several days. The vigil was an instrument of our grieving and a voice for racial justice on Duke's campus. Higher wages and union recognition for the non-academic employees—cooks, food-servers, maids, and janitors, most of whom were black—became the focal issue. We sat peacefully and largely silent day and night, studying for finals, listening to Dr. King's speeches and singing "We Shall Overcome" every hour. To this day I count it as a major event in my spiritual formation.

Jesse Helms came on the television and said that all of the students sitting on the quad at Duke should ask their parents if it would be all right for their son or daughter to "marry a Negro" (Duke students were practically all white in those days). Unless the student's parents approved of that prospect, Helms advised, he or she should go back to class. We all took the words as vindication for our cause.

This should not only tell you what a racist fucktard Helms was, but just how diseased so many Republitards are who idolize him to this day.

[Jadeite]

Too bad he didn't live long enough to see Obama win the Presidency.

[Gil Hamilton]

Too bad he didn't live long enough to see Obama win the Presidency.

However, with any luck, God WILL turn out to look like Morgan Freeman.

[SirNitram]

Just for a cheap laugh, I buzzed by the Republitard sites and you'd think a Saint had just croaked.

A political movement that lionizes Limbaugh and Lynching Mob O'Reilly will never discard Helms.

This is the heart of modern conservatism, and it turns out it's all hate. Surprise, surprise.