Another One Bites the Dust

In case you missed it throughout the weekend festivities, Sen. Jesse Helms died on July 4. I think one Agitator commenter put it best:

Black man to be elected president over Jesse Helms dead body. News at 11.

Helms was an effective senator, a masterful politician...and a racist S.O.B. 'til the end.


Men like Helms have been revered in both life and death as great senators, never minding their despicable histories--making their careers fighting the 'Lost Cause' or, at the very least in Helms' case, using racial bigotry to his electoral advantage. Under the guidance of the Sam Rayburns and Richard Russells of the old Southern Democrats, these men did everything they could to continue segregation, discrimination and racism.

I don't buy for a moment the post-Civil Rights era apologies of Sens. Thurmond, Byrd and others--so, in one respect, I suppose I have to give credit to Helms for being true to his vile, repugnant, ugly, racist, bigoted self.

Oh, and leave it to the these guys to chime in:

Ed Feulner, president of the U.S.-based conservative Heritage Foundation, said Helms was "one of the most consequential figures of the 20th century."
"Along with Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, he helped establish the conservative movement and became a powerful voice for free markets and free people," he said.

Lumping Helms in with Goldwater and Reagan is irresponsible, disgusting, and asinine. While it is true that Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act, he did so on federalism grounds--not a pronounced and unabashed disdain for black people. I've always regretted his vote on that act and make no excuses for it--he should have voted differently. That said, a leading conservative leader today tying Helms to the two greatest conservative politicians of the 20th century tarnishes a legacy already in tatters from the absurd policies put forth in conservatism's name by the Bush administration.

Helms is dead, and America is a better place for it.

Good riddance.

Someone Else Fed Up With the Right's Indifference on Race

An excellent piece by Hitchens excoriating Huckabee, Paul, South Carolina and the press. An excerpt:

Thus, as well as crassly behaving exactly like someone "from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag," former Gov. Huckabee of Arkansas deliberately aligned himself with the rancorous minority who are still not reconciled to the idea that South Carolina may not officially consecrate racism and slavery and secession. "Your flag"? What an insult, not just to the descendants of slavery but to the many, many other loyalists and Unionists who fought and died to bring their state back into the Union. And what is the point of the "outside the state" slur? Wasn't this exactly what Gov. Orval Faubus of Arkansas used to say, as if to make it seem that all was hunky-dory in his own tight little dominion until them goddam "outside agitators" arrived? In the end, as Gov. Huckabee may or may not recall, the 101^st Airborne Division, most of them "outsiders" not from Arkansas, had to be sent by a Republican president to integrate the schools of Little Rock. That was a lot of trouble and expense that the big-mouth rednecks put us all to, but it was worth it. It's insufferable to hear this glib idiot make a mockery of it now in order to try to get the Klan vote in South Carolina.

St. Reagan, Race, and the Right

A very good piece by Publius, over at Obsidian Wings:

Others just flat-out ignore race and pretend that things like grinding poverty rooted in historical discrimination doesn’t exist. They squeeze the contradiction out from the ideal. Every now and then, though, the contradiction comes bubbling up to our gated-community eyes, Masque of the Red Death-style – just like it did in New Orleans. But that's the exception - many of us can go about our daily lives, blissfully ignorant.

The piece concentrates on David Brooks and many others in the Right who beatify our 40th President and dismiss the more seedy methods of courting the Southern electorate. Publius insists that the Right just needs to own up to the racist past and demonstrate that its current messages are not double-speak for more racist policies.

My problem is this -- while probably outside of the scope of the piece, Publius infers that it is primarily the Right that needs to come to terms with the past. Yet, the last time I checked, racism does not respect party lines or political ideologies.

LBJ, for example, was a racist and ardent segregationist who pushed Civil Rights for political reasons -- and his 'War on Poverty' left more black families destitute, living in urban squalor, and welfare dependent than any other program in U.S. history. So, I think there is plenty of reckoning to go around than to just place it on Reaganites.

Let us not forget FDR's internment of Japanese during WWII, JFK's wiretapping of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a subversive, and Sen. Robert Byrd's high position in the Ku Klux Klan -- hollow, after-the-fact apologies notwithstanding.

Racism is an American problem, not just a Republican one.