Diseased Racist helms dies on a scooter batshitcrazy with vascular dimentia!

[ProfessorMurder]

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Former Sen. Jesse Helms, who built a career along the fault lines of racial politics and battled liberals, died on the Fourth of July.

As he aged, Helms was slowed by a variety of illnesses, including a bone
disorder, prostate cancer and heart problems, and he made his way through
the Capitol on a motorized scooter as his career neared an end. In April 2006,
his family announced that he had been moved into a convalescent center
after being diagnosed with vascular dementia

Race Matters - Jesse Helms, WhiteRacist, by David Broder

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.

Many of the accounts of Helms's retirement linked him with another
prospective retiree, Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Both these
Senate veterans switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party when
the Democrats began pressing for civil rights legislation in the 1960s. But
there is a great difference between them. Thurmond, who holds the record for
the longest anti-civil rights filibuster, accepted change. For three decades he
has treated African Americans and black institutions as respectfully as he
treats all his other constituents.

To the best of my knowledge, Helms has never done what the late George
Wallace did well before his death -- recant and apologize for his use of racial
issues. And that use was blatant.

In 1984, when Helms faced his toughest opponent in Democratic Gov. Jim
Hunt, the late Bill Peterson, one of the most evenhanded reporters I have
ever known, summed up what "some said was the meanest Senate campaign
in history."

"Racial epithets and standing in school doors are no longer fashionable,"
Peterson wrote, "but 1984 proved that the ugly politics of race are alive and
well. Helms is their master."

A year before the election, when public polls showed Helms trailing by 20
points, he launched a Senate filibuster against the bill making the birthday of
Martin Luther King Jr. a national holiday. Thurmond and the Senate majority
were on the other side, but the next poll showed Helms had halved his deficit.

All year, Peterson reported, "Helms campaign literature sounded a drumbeat of
warnings about black voter-registration drives. . . . On election eve, he
accused Hunt of being supported by 'homosexuals, the labor union bosses and
the crooks' and said he feared a large 'bloc vote.' What did he mean? 'The
black vote,' Helms said." He won, 52 percent to 48 percent.

In 1990, locked in a tight race with an African American Democrat, former
Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt, Helms aired a final-week TV ad that showed a
pair of white hands crumpling a rejection letter, while an announcer said, "You
needed that job and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a
minority because of a racial quota." Once again, he pulled through.


That is not a history to be sanitized.