Still Speaking Ill of the Dead (Yes, Those "Jam Bands" All Suck!)

Jack White (No, not the guy from the White Stripes, yeesh, wise up!) has something to say about the treatment of Jesse Helms, that is, the denial of his flagrant racism after his death.

Bob Dole, the Republican former senator whose wife Elizabeth now occupies the North Carolina Senate seat once held by Helms, asked rhetorically, "Was Jesse Helms a racist? I never spotted that in him," which suggests that Dole must be either blind or really stupid. And in what might be the most extreme example of white-washing since Tom Sawyer, Marc Thiessen, the chief White House speech writer, rhapsodized in a Washington Post op-ed that, "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."

Nice, huh? The mainstream moved toward this wretched old bastard who wished he were still in the 19th fucking century. Now he's in hell, of course, if his religious beliefs actually meant anything to him, and suffering as he so richly deserves. Ineresting sidelight: Just heard a caller on the radio say that as the Senate's FISA bill vote was delayed a day for Old Man Helms' funeral, Helms did more dead than live Democrats did to stop the bill's passage. Oh, irony.