Jesse Helms: racist crackpot or fascist toad?

Today, right-wing nutjob and Pinochet collaborator Jesse Helms, longtime senator from North Carolina, has finally had his creaky, long-expired carcass tossed into the ash-heap of history. There is a punchline to this post, so, stick with me through the next several paragraphs' as I eulogize one of the most despicable creatures ever to be inflicted upon the US Senate.

For those who are not familiar with Jesse Helms, this fish-eyed troll's career was a roller coaster ride through all the most revolting and unpleasant asspects of the American social conservative movement. He once said of civil rights marches that "[t]he 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" and repeatedly called into the question the morality of interracial marriage. Newspapers that criticized him, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, were dismissed as "infested with homosexuals." Homosexuals themselves were, of course, "disgusting, revolting," responsible for HIV, and "weak, miserable wretches."

During a 1950s campaign against a Democrat, Helms warned voters that his opponent favored "mingling of the races," highlighting the particular dangers of "Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories."

Even as this rotten fruitcake (also a Baptist) was descending into dementia in his enfeebled old age, he still had the gumption to threaten Bill Clinton's life over a foreign policy disagreement, which of course is pretty tough talk for a guy who threw in his lot with Pinochet and who referred to mass murderer Roberto D'Aubuisson as "a free enterprise man and deeply religious."

When he wasn't busy spewing his nauseating vitriol all over gay people, rallying the most nefarious arms of his conservative base in opposition to racial equality, or warmly endorsing megalomaniacal Chilean war criminals, Helms enjoyed such activities as getting dementia. And now he is dead.

And here is the punchline: Republicans are sad about Helms dying.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, an incompetent Republican stooge who has overseen the demise of the Kentucky GOP and whose seat is hotly contested this fall by challenger and non-idiot Bruce Lunsford, has said that "Sen. Jesse Helms was a leading voice and courageous champion for the many causes he believed in." White House spokesman Scott Stanzel has said (quoted in the same story linked above), "America lost a great public servant and true patriot today." His Senatorial successor, unabashed theocrat Elizabeth Dole, the only president of the Red Cross to be publicly accused of incompetence, has not yet commented.

This impish caveman's legacy is divided evenly between the invigoration of Good Christian racist cranks in the 60s, Good Christian homophobes in the 70s, and full-to-overflowing mass graves scattered throughout Chile. How dare Mitch McConnell tell us that we have lost a "champion?" How dare the White House tell us we have lost a "patriot?" What we have lost is an example of what happens when you combine populism with [conservative] religious people: murderous racist unAmerican whackos whose deaths are a sigh of relief to anyone who values honest democracy.

Make sure you contact Mitch McConnell (and his opponent) and let him know what we think about McConnell's post-mortum depression over the overdue demise of an evil Klansman wannabe and supporter of fascism like Jesse Helms.