Wednesday, July 9th, 2008...7:43 pm
I Came to Lay Ceasar Out, Not to Hip You to Him
I was out of town when news of Jesse Helms’s death hit. I decided not to write anything about him, frankly because I couldn’t figure out anything good to say. Over the last few days, I’ve been struck by journalists talking about him like he was just some standard issue conservative, a conservative “lion” even. I don’t think it says a heck a lot about the conservative movement that this hateful, ignorant bigot was regarded as one of their heroes.
Yep, I said it.
This isn’t just a matter of him being a man of his time (cue Rusty pointing out that Robert Byrd was a member of the Klan for a few months six decades ago), he argued that Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement was communist inspired well into the 1980’s and used his position on the Foreign Relations Committee to support the Apartheid government of South Africa.
I’ll leave it to Christopher Hitchens to give Helms and his ilk the eulogy they deserve. Hitchens’s particular brand of bile seems so appropriate here.
Everytime some unreconstructed segregationist dies, we hear about how they were disliked for being outspoken conservatives who were just for state’s rights or some nonsense. Okay, let’s buy that one for a minute. Here’s Isaac Chotiner from the New Republic who blogged about the conservative whitewash of Helms’s career:
The point is not that liberals believe every conservative is pretending to be in favor of states rights, or using the phrase as a code word. The point is that liberals think it says something really, really bad if you cared more about states rights than you did about keeping blacks as second-class citizens throughout much of the country.
Indeed.
12 Comments
July 10th, 2008 at 8:41 am
Here’s the definitive “obit” on Jesse Helms: http://news.aol.com/political-machine/2008/07/04/jesse-helms-american-garbage/
July 10th, 2008 at 10:38 am
If there is any justice, Helms will reincarnate as an African-American man with AIDS.
July 10th, 2008 at 10:48 am
Gee Tedski, I’m honored to be considered a reference for one of your blogs. You should note, that although it seems that Byrd did allow his KKK membership to lapse, he continued the racial rants for years. The best was his 1945 statement, “I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side… Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.” And even years after that “enlightened” statement he was still saying things like, “The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia and in every state in the nation.”
Finally a quick comment about your note on Kolbe:
“Kolbe was in the navy, he knows better than to stay on a vessel that isn’t seaworthy.”
As someone who has worn the uniform of the US Navy, I can tell you that isn’t true. YOU DON’T GIVE UP THE SHIP! It’s called Damage Control and it’s used to make an un-seaworthy ship seaworthy and capable of fighting the enemy. I suggest you spend some time reading a bit about the Naval history of WW II. You will learn a lot about brave sailors who, against all commonsense, charged into blazing and flooding holds to put out fires and plug holes, even when it meant sacrificing their lives for their comrades. Many of those ships came back to defeat Axis warships.
July 10th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Ted, you give the man entirely too much credit. You say he kept it up ‘well in to the 1980’s.’ He didn’t stop in the 1980’s, in fact let’s take a look at Helms in the 1990’s.
in Helms 1993 sang “Dixie” in an elevator to Carol Moseley-Braun, the first African-American woman elected to the Senate, bragging, “I’m going to make her cry. I’m going to sing Dixie until she cries.” (Chicago Sun-Times, 8/5/93)
In the Capital Times on November 22, 1994 he is quoted as calling the University of North Carolina (UNC) “the University of Negroes and Communists.”
In 1995, Helms was a guest on the Larry King show. A caller called in and thanked Helms for, “everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers,” Helms’ response was to salute the camera and say, “Well, thank you, I think.”
Even in this decade, he is quoted as saying that black civil rights leaders are “Communists and sex perverts.” (Copley News Service, 8/23/01)
His bigotry was not limited to blacks, of course. In the December 5, 1994 issue of Newsweek, Helms is quoted as saying that homosexuals were “weak, morally sick wretches.”
Helms remonstrated ten female members of the House of Representatives to “act like ladies” when they interrupted a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing to demand support of a U.N. treaty against gender discrimination, and subsequently had them removed from the hearing by Capitol police. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 10/28/99)
source
All I can say is this– if I were Charles Manson, I’d ask for the same people to write my obit as the ones now writing the obits for Helms.
July 10th, 2008 at 11:07 am
Rusty…1945?
The part you and other appologists like to forget is how many of these segregationist Democrats that y’all love to go on about from the 60’s are now your base. One that was courted and seems to run the party now.
July 10th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Also:
Rusty:
There is a difference between someone who stands up and admits they were wrong and someone who (as far as I know) never said any such thing.
I am able to forgive. But to earn forgiveness you must first admit that you were wrong and change your behavior.
Also, if they describe a racist reprobate like Helms as a ‘conservative lion’ then the term itself loses any meaning. There are principled conservatives in the Senate with whom I nearly always disagree, but I can still respect. But if Helms is a ‘lion’ then what do you write when you have to do an obituary for someone like, for example, Pete Domenici or Richard Lugar (two examples of Senate conservatives who I respect enough to legitimately consider them for that label though I hardly ever agree with them.)
July 10th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Gosh Tedski, I wish you and Rush Limbaugh would get together and let us know who runs the Republican Party. You say it is the segregationist Democrats from the 60s who came over to the GOP that run the party. Rush says it’s the moderate country club Republicans. Actually, I run around with a lot of Republicans and none of them belong to the country club or are racist.
July 10th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Rusty-
Of course, because after eight years of Bush, who knows anyone that can afford to be in a country club?
July 13th, 2008 at 9:21 am
Rusty-
The Neoconservatives run your party. Neoconservatives were once Democrats in the 60’s, but were considered too hawkish for the left. Under Buckley they founded the National Review and swept the party, culminating with Regan’s election in 1980, and Bush in 2000.
Neoconservatives have support from the racist elements in our nation and share the same views on use of power domestically and internationally as these groups. They are the foundation for the nationalist movement that is building, especially with younger white males.
I look forward to the day when a select group of Neocons stand trial for conspiracy against America.
J.
July 15th, 2008 at 11:35 am
Rusty, you forgot to remind us how a Republican president (Lincoln) freed the slaves and about how all those Dixiecrats voted against the Civil Rights Act, thus proving that the GOP is the party of racial equality, now and in perpetuity.
July 15th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Golly Gee, Rushtbucket (since you are a navy man),
Tain’t never heard of Lee Atwater’s (Rove’s mentor) Southern Strategy? It was used as recently as the 2000 election. Probably not viable any longer due to changing demographics (all the old racists are dead or dying) and Obama’s 50 state strategy concedes nothing to you pricks.
>>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Strategy
July 15th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Bob Herbert, a New York Times columnist, reported a 1981 interview with Lee Atwater, published in Southern Politics in the 1990s by Prof. Alexander P. Lamis, in which Lee Atwater discussed politics in the South:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
Herbert wrote in the same column, “The truth is that there was very little that was subconscious about the G.O.P.’s relentless appeal to racist whites. Tired of losing elections, it saw an opportunity to renew itself by opening its arms wide to white voters who could never forgive the Democratic Party for its support of civil rights and voting rights for blacks.”
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