The Competitive Demonization of Jesse Helms

My initial post on Jesse Helms death (where I cite the left's tremendous disrespect of the North Carolina Senator), generated this from Whisky Fire:

The numbnut at the American Power blog says this post is "among the most disrespectful" posts about Helms' death in the Left Blogosphere. The devil you say! This is at least one of the top two most disrespectful posts in the Left Blogosphere on the subject of this particular expired bigot, as it features the word "motherf**ker." Martini Revolution says "good f**king riddance," and Comments from Left Field remarks that he was a "racist, homophobic assbag," which are both accurate and morally unexceptionable, but do not rise to the level of "motherf**ker." I'm not sure we've surpassed TBogg's observation that Senator Helms is currently getting ass-f**ked by Roy Cohn in Hell, however.

These are crucial distinctions and it is important to get them right.

What can I say? Maybe the lefties find competitive demonization funny?

I can note that a number of other commentators noticed the depths of Whiskey Fire's depravity, for example, in Noel Sheppard's, "Netroots Celebrate Helms's Death With Vulgar Attacks:"

Apparently devoid of ... human decency, the folks in the Netroots, within minutes of Friday's announcement concerning the death of Jesse Helms, began publishing virulent and vulgar epithets directed at the former senator, with some actually voicing a desire to dance on his grave.

Devoid of human decency pretty much sums things up. Indeed, not to be outdone, Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings, sought this morning to have the last word on Helms' alleged evil, starting with an obligatory moral qualifier:

I haven't written anything about Jesse Helms' death, since I don't like speaking ill of the dead. However: every so often, conservatives wonder: why oh why do people think that the Republican party, and/or the conservative movement, is bigoted? I think that the conservative response to Helms' death ought to settle that debate once and for all.

Hilzoy's post is one long chronicle of Helms' statements on the controversial issues of the day, with not a shred of countervailing information to provide some balance.

It's clear that left and right are not going to agree on how to treat the legacy of someone as polarizing as Jesse Helms.

But for the record, here are some additional thought for consideration, first, from Marc Thiessen:

With the passing of Sen. Jesse Helms, the media have demonstrated one final time that they never fully understood the power or impact of this great man. Consider, for example, The Post's obituary of Helms; here are some things you would not learn about his life and legacy by reading it:

As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Helms led the successful effort to bring Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into the NATO alliance. He secured passage of bipartisan legislation to protect our men and women in uniform from the International Criminal Court. He won overwhelming approval for his legislation to support the Cuban people in their struggle against a tyrant. He won majority support in the Senate for his opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. He helped secure passage of the National Missile Defense Act and stopped the Clinton administration from concluding a new anti-ballistic missile agreement in its final months in office -- paving the way for today's deployment of America's first defenses against ballistic missile attack. He helped secure passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, which expressed strong bipartisan support for regime change in Baghdad. He secured broad, bipartisan support to reorganize the State Department and bring much-needed reform to the United Nations, and he became the first legislator from any nation to address the U.N. Security Council -- a speech few in that chamber will forget.

Watching this record of achievement unfold, columnist William Safire wrote in 1997: "Jesse Helms, bete noire of knee-jerk liberals . . . is turning out to be the most effectively bipartisan chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since Arthur Vandenberg. . . . Let us see if he gets the credit for statesmanship that he deserves from a striped-pants establishment." This weekend, we got our answer.

What his critics could not appreciate is that, by the time he left office, Jesse Helms had become a mainstream conservative. And it was not because Helms had moved toward the mainstream -- it was because the mainstream moved toward him.

But note the discussion of Helm's in William Link's preface to, Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism:

Although Jesse had earned a fearsome reputation for his slash-and-burn political tactics, there was also a softer side. Within his political circle, Helms was compassionate and caring; his Senate staffers uniformly remembered him warmly. By the late 1980s, Helms was well known for his personal style and his conscious rejection of the imperiousness of some of his colleagues. In 1998, when the Washingtonian surveyed 1,200 staffers and Capitol Hill employees, Jesse was rated among the nicest senators. Garrett Epps, a columnist for the liberal Independent Weekly, published in Durham, interviewed Helms in 1989. He was surprised at what he found. “The Helms I expected,” he recalled, “was a sizzling-hot, angry, defensive ideologue.” The person he found instead was “relaxed, friendly, funny and genuinely curious about ideas and people.” Don Nickles, one of Helms’s closest allies in the Senate, later reflected that the common caricatures of Helms as mean and vindictive were “misplaced.” Nickles described him as “probably the nicest person serving in the Senate,” certainly “the most gentlemanly of any of the senators,” and a person who “epitomized the Southern gentleman.” In his dealings with other senators he was “always very pleasant, never disagreeable.” He was also unpretentious, according to Nickles. During Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981, Nickles recalled, Helms objected when police stopped traffic so that a bus with senators could pass through.

Helms’ personal warmth extended beyond senators. The third floor of the Dirksen Office Building, where Jesse’s Senate offices were located, contained two public elevators, which were old and slow, and three private elevators reserved only for senators. Staffers and visitors that snuck on the senators’ elevator were routinely evicted. The public elevator, located just outside of Helms’s office, was often crowded with tourists. If he noticed them waiting, Helms delighted in gathering tourists and taking them on the senators’ elevator, or for a ride on the Senate subway shuttle that ran between Dirksen and the Capitol, even when votes were about to occur and the shuttle was reserved for senators. Sometimes, on the spur of the moment, Helms ushered tourists to the family gallery, on the third floor of the Senate, and provided seats for them to watch the proceedings. The Senate guards were so used to Jesse’s routine with visitors that they often chuckled when they saw him coming with an entourage in tow. He considered himself a sort of unofficial host of Capitol Hill, and he personally felt that it was his duty to ensure that tourists enjoyed their visit.

There's more at the link.

Helms was also apparently unsurpassed at constituency service, a quality even Pam Spaulding noted in her otherwise critical obituary (which she updates here).

Other leftists were also respectful (here and here, for example), but overall I think the whole episode largely confirms the secular demonology of contemporary far left-wing ideologues on matters of life and death.

See also, Little Green Footballs, "RIP, Jesse Helms," and Ross Douthat, "The Case of Jesse Helms."

Douthat says Helms should not be a model:

If Ronald Reagan and Helms had similar positions on countless issues, that doesn't prove that Helms was good for conservatism; it only suggests that conservatives should look for more Reagans, and fewer Jesse Helms. I'm happy to defend Helms' views on a variety of issues, but the man himself has no business in the right-wing pantheon, and the conservatives who have used his death as an occasion to argue that he does are doing their movement a grave disservice.

That's not the key issue from my perspective (and Douthat might underestimate Helms' impact), but see the whole thing.

There's an interesting reaction at Village Voice as well, "Post Racial: Rightbloggers Shade Helms' Civil Rights History."

Photo Credit: New York Times