Thanks for Disappearing !

One of the best gifts imaginable for the United States on its birthday, perhaps the only one this misguided fanatic ever gave to his country, was the death of Jesse Helms yesterday, also one embarrassment less for another native son of that man's home state whose university, UNC-Chapel Hill, he once said should be driven out of the country because it was a hotbed of pinko liberal fagotism. I have always been proud to be a graduate of the university Jesse Helms so despised. The man was never more than a hot-headed rabble-rousing TV commentator from eastern NC: a fool laughed at in my childhood, a senator who damaged the state and the country in my young adult years.

The New York Times

Jesse Helms Dies at 86; Conservative Force in the Senate
By STEVEN A. HOLMES, Published: July 5, 2008

Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina senator with the courtly manner and mossy drawl who turned his hard-edged conservatism against civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Friday. He was 86.

Jesse Helms: Polarizer, not a compromiser - washingtonpost.com

WASHINGTON -- "Compromise, hell!" Jesse Helms screamed in a 1959 editorial that captured what would become the legacy of his Senate career and his place in the conservative movement. [...]
No to civil rights. No to abortion. No to communism. No to the United Nations. No to gay rights. No to arts funding with nakedness. No to school busing. No to the U.S. giving up the Panama Canal. No to a nuclear arms reduction treaty called Salt II.