What a jackass.
My parents once attended some function held in his honor; as a result, I have a little book about dear ol’ Jesse entitled “And the World Came His Way”. I’ve never read it.
I’m only sad because I one day wanted Jesse Helms, Jesse Jackson, and Jesse Ventura all locked in a small room for a week just to see what would happen.
No, he was a Democrat back then. He turned Republican after that…I’m not sure exactly when, but I would presume around the time they turned against civil rights in order to capture disaffected conservative southern voters…
Jesse was a Democrat in the Old Days. Back then the GOP was the Party of Lincoln. This continued until Nixon used his “Southern Strategy” (i.e. played the race card). Besides the northern Democrats were letting Black people vote and stuff.
So why would racist editorials attract conservatives?
That’s a very interesting question. I’d love to hear Phelps’ opinion of Helms.
Wait, here’s one thing, at least:
He was also an ardent supporter of Pinochet – he only seems to have been concerned with human-rights abuses when Communists were inflicting them – but that’s better than nothing.
So AIDS is a gay disease? 
Regards,
Shodan
In a nutshell, because there are several different kinds of “conservatives,” with many points of difference but some Boolean intersection between them, and they have been forging strategic alliances ever since the Goldwater campaign.
There are some signs, now, that that coalition is starting to fracture, just as liberals/leftists/progressives of various stripes are starting to bury their differences and work together and reach out to some populist conservatives who share some of their goals – a story told in The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington, by David Sirota.
Let all good Americans make it their business to keep “Pinwheel” Jesse spinning in his grave! 
The consistent racist and homophobic bigotry really jumps off the page in that Wiki entry. No surprise he’s such a hero to the Freepers.
What in the referenced legislation makes the UN more of anything, good or bad?
When was the UN ever a “hot air society for third world despots?” That’s news to me, especially since the US was the key founding nation.
If Dante was writing the* Divine Comedy* today, the three people in the center of hell would be Jesse Helms, Jerry Falwell, and Ronald Reagan.
Conservative does not necessarily equal Republican.
You can always count on the Freepers.
Please remember, when you think about nasty segregationists in the 1950s in the South, those guys were all Democrats. Racists shifted to the GOP when the Democrats went nuts with McGovern.
I note Helms’ death is not at the moment on CNN’s front page. The man was bypassed by history.
The Democrats were the conservative party then. Those people weren’t liberals.
I did not say they were.
Yes, actually, in the spirit that I said “because straight people weren’t dying,” AIDS IS a gay disease. That spirit is in the spirit of mocking Helms’s homophobic opposition to AIDs.
Of course straight people were dying of AIDS in the US. Gay people were dying disproportionately, and his homophobia was his explicit reason for opposing AIDS research (the NYTimes editorial has the relevant quotes). It was only when he saw straight people as its primary victims in Africa that he became concerned.
Daniel