Jesse Helms Is Dead

I love NYT's breaking news alerts. Their phrasing, especially when people die, is the most disorienting prose to get delivered on your phone, next to texts that say "WHERRE R U?" Seriously, read this aloud, like poetry:

Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina Senator whose courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Thursday in Raleigh, N.C. He was 86.

3 comments

http://alaskareport.com/news78/x61415_jesse_h ... Helms was particularly vitriolic when speaking of gays and lesbians, blaming them for "the proliferation of AIDS," and stating that he disliked using the word "gay" to refer to them since, "...there's nothing gay about them." Helms opposed the Martin Luther King Day bill in 1983 on grounds that King had two associates with communist ties, Stanley Levison and Jack O'Dell; as well, he voiced disapproval of King's alleged philandering. Helms' referred to the University of North Carolina (UNC) as the "University of Negroes and Communists." (Charleston Gazette, 9/15/95) While working on the 1950 campaign of Republican Willis Smith against Democrat Frank Porter Graham, Helms helped create an ad that 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.(FAIR 9/1/01, The News and Observer 8/26/01) Helms was an ardent supporter of the late brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. When Roberta Achtenberg was appointed Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1993 by President Bill Clinton, Helms attempted to block her confirmation, stating that he refused to vote for "that damned lesbian". After a protest during his 1986 visit to Mexico, Helms opined: "All Latins are volatile people. Hence, I was not surprised at the volatile reaction." Helms once claimed that "The New York Times and Washington Post are both infested with homosexuals themselves. Just about every person down there is a homosexual or lesbian." Sad sack of shit that deserves every thing that is being said about him....who cares what any news program says....everyone knows what he was, and your either for him or against him...and in that case, for hatred, ignorance, bigotry, disrespect, sadism, hitler, nazis, or against it...

posted by rcs at 2008-07-04 15:30:33

The unsatisfying part of all of this is that Satan is probably cutting him some slack and letting him hang out in the back office and swapping stories and stuff.

posted by Eric at 2008-07-05 18:54:36

Bit of a shame, really. I was hoping he'd live to see a black man elected president and then choke on his own bile.

posted by rma at 2008-07-08 10:48:40

Jesse Helms Is Dead

Rex Sorgatz