Racist Piece Of Shit Jesse Helms Is Dead

Posted by Dock Ellis as Celebrations, Guest Author, LOL Douchebags, Op/Ed, Politics

July 4, 2008 was a great day for America- it was the day we were finally rid of the cancer known as Jesse Helms. Helms was an evil, racist man who repeatedly tried to send our nation back to the dark ages with his hypocritical mix of professed christianity, support for big business, and hatred/fear of anyone who wasn’t white and heterosexual. The modern Neocon movement has its beginnings with Helms’ early understanding that scared, angry white men vote in droves.

To give the devil his due, Helms was one of the most effective operators in 20th century American politics. He (along with fellow racist Strom Thurmond) brought the south out of it’s antebellum political rut and helped found the Republican juggernaut that rapes our land today. Helms was in the first wave of politicians that revived the Republican party in the south with a molotov coctail of religion, racism, and good ol’ boy populism.  “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?” read a 1950 ad Helms worked on for Senator  Willis Smith.  He also famously referred to the 1964 Civil Rights Act as “the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress”.

In 1972,  Helms became the first Republican Senator from North Carolina of the 20th century. Four years later he backed Ronald Reagan in the state’s presidential primary, handing Reagan’s lost cause campaign a victory that revived him enough to pose a serious challenge to  Gerald Ford at the Republican convention that year. Reagan lost the primary, but was positioned to take the party’s nomination in 1980- something that would have been impossible without the 1976 win in North Carolina.

Helms was savvy enough to know that fear and divisiveness alone don’t ensure victory at the polls, so he often resorted to old-fashioned cheating.  Helms’ North Carolina Congressional Club was repeatedly fined by the Federal Election Commission for illegally financing his campaigns. In 1992, the Helms campaign itself was penalized by the FEC for for mailing postcards to 125,000 black voters, threatening them with jail if they tried to exercise their right to vote.

For someone who professed such deep christianity, Helms racked up quite a reputation as a slumlord in Raleigh, even having separate management companies to handle his properties in the white and black sections of town.

It would be nice to believe that the death of Jesse Helms is symbolic of the decline of the politics of fear in our country- that maybe someday raising a boogyman (communists, blacks, muslims, gays, etc) won’t be enough to win elections or push agendas that go against the interests of average, working Americans.

I guess we’ll see in November.