I have a challenge: Convince me why Jesse Helms deserves such hatred. Disclaimer: I am not defending Jesse Helms and don’t want you to, either. My challenge for you is to justify the sentiments I have quoted.
My challenge has one rule: Your indictment of Helms cannot simply be apply a label or name. You can’t simply say “because he’s a so-and-so.” You must cite specific actions he has done to justify this attitude.
I post this knowing my intent might be misunderstood. What is my intent? To ask, how do you know what you know? Do you hate him because you have specific and clear reasons, or is it because it is the norm in your circle?
(Also, I do not live in North Carolina, his state, and never have.)
So, convince me. I will respect any informed opinion.
I will try to make this entry as short as possible. Anti-gay rights, racist, backwoods hick- all these adjectives describe him to a ‘T’. This guys has campaigned again and again to destroy the national endowment for the arts and public television (totalling a mere few billion per capita) but pushes any half-assed pork barrel defense program (totaling hundereds of billions a year or more) that comes down the pike. For some reason he was appointed to the Senate Foreign Relations Committe, an odd appointment for someone with all the international perspective of an oyster. From this position, he has been holding back our annual payment dues to the UN for God knows how long; exacerbating our often tenuous relationships with that organization to the breaking point.
Jesse also threatened the life of then-President Clinton, saying “Mr. Clinton better watch out in he comes down here (to North Carolina). He’d better have a bodyguard.”
In 1989, Helms tried to censor the National Endowment for the Arts by introducing a bill that would stop them from funding any obscene works. Unfortunately for his bill, it also would have banned works by Shakespeare, Euripedes, Wagner, Rembrandt, Picasso, and other great artists.
I sat in on a committee meeting that he was chairing once. I don’t remember exactly what it was about, but I believe it had to do with some major issue in China. Human rights abuses, I THINK. Before he asked the guy who was testifying any questions, he spent a couple minutes hitting on the translator.
Know it’s not much, but I wanted to tell the anectdote.
Ex-Senator (just for the record) Jesse Helms repulses me like few others. Doesn’t mean he deserves death. But since everybody’s got to go, I hope his is very painful.
I say that, and I’m leaving it at that, because I don’t think it’s possible to prove what Andy’s suggesting. So I’m not bothering and just having fun with it.
I think that the case could be made that Helms deserved death if he had been directly responsible for someone’s death. (As in murder. As in doing the deed himself, or ordering someone else to murder.) There are other horrible crimes (child molestation, torture, etc.), that I would feel almost deserve death (meaning, I wouldn’t cry buckets if a child molestor was murdered), but I wouldn’t impose a death sentence myself on such a person. Life in prison, hard labor, no parole—that would do it for me.
Barring that, no matter how nasty you may think him to be (I am not all that fond of Helms), it doesn’t mean that he deserves death. If a general nastiness or “evil” was all it took to deserve death, a lot of people would be in trouble. Many people find a wide variety of things “evil” after all. We’d all have to be watching our backs.
“This guys has campaigned again and again to destroy the national endowment for the arts and public television”
If ever there were a case for the death penalty, this is surely it. We might be able to get Bill Moyers to throw the switch, and have the Riverdance folks perform at the wake.
Didn’t Jesse Helms also made a death threat against Bill Clinton? The infamous “Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here [to North Carolina] … we got a pile of military installations in North Carolina.” As Michael Moore has pointed out, that was a violation of federal law, and the Secret Service should have busted Jesse’s arse and toss him in the can…
My challenge is for you to convince me that he deserves such hatred. Your indictment of Helms cannot simply be apply a label or name. You can’t simply say “because he’s a so-and-so.”
See previous. Specifics.
And David630 are you saying he is evil and it is acceptable to hate him because he is a “backwoods hick”?
If supporting pork-barrel spending makes you evil, most of Congress is evil. I’m unclear as to why this warrants death.
That is simple name-calling. Tell me what you disagree with in his foreign-relations outlook.
So you seem to be on record as saying that disagreeing with the U.N. makes you evil?
I’m assuming that Mr. Helms could not have held up these payments solely by himself, so there must have been others who concur. They are all evil? I am not contradicting you, merely asking for specifics.
Yes, that sounds pretty bad. You have a point there.
Feminists also have campaigned against obscenity. So, by extension …? I’m not disagreeing, I’m just asking why is the hatred justified.
I’ll accept specific citations that you post from a credible source. The FAIR organization has some credibility issues, though. I’m entirely willing to listen to specific charges from a credible source.
The alleged Clinton threat is an interesting case, rjung, and brings up the issue of why Helms got away with a comment that might have spelled trouble for an ordinary citizen.
I suppose this thread requires mention of this BBQ Pit thread, which I unfortunately steered in the direction of wishing death on the Senator. There was also a similar subject discussed here in GD about the same time, but that may have fallen into our Winter of Missed Content because I failed to find it.
In this case the point I’m trying to make is that it may not be possible to convince you that Helms is deserving of the unusually vitriolic responses which are directed toward him. Here’s what I had to say on page 2 of that thread, in response to one of our most eloquent members:
And I was quite serious when I said it. Helms is a jerk in a particularly corrosive way: his comments and actions are usually directed against minorities which do not have the power to directly confront him and he hits them on a very personal level. That, I think, fosters a genuine sense of vulnerability in the people he targets.
If you have been lucky enough to escape or fail to notice Helms’ actions against you personally it may be difficult to empathize with those who want him dead and gone. But believe me, if you did find yourself being marginalized by that man’s downright impish escapades, you felt it personally, and it made you both fearful and angry. That, I think, is why so many normally reasonable people don’t have a problem with vocally wishing him a quick demise.
He provided critical support to Pinochet from the beginning of the murderous dictator’s rise to power. He was one of the loudest voices in Washington supporting the killer.
He also offered support to the government of Apartheid South Africa, the death-squad-wielding governments of El Salvador and Guatemala.
I’ll leave it to other folks to talk about this blocking of funding for AIDS research in the late eighties and early nineties, his opposition to the International Criminal Court, and other cases in which he did everything in his power to promote policies that resulted in lots and lots of people dying horribly.
I don’t consciously wish death on anyone, but I am ashamed to say that when in the mid nineties I heard that Jesse Helms was dying of bone cancer, I had a moment of rejoicing.
I’d like to get some specifics on some of the allegations mentioned by the posters here.
david630:
So? I’d like to see the NEA and public TV lose all their taxpayer-funded handouts, too. And I generally support the military. May I ask how that makes me evil, as opposed to just someone who disagrees with you? What is it about opposition to the NEA that makes me an awful person, deserving of death?
This is pretty serious, if true. Do you have a cite that could put the quote in better context? As is, it could be a threat, or it could not. If I lived in a bad part of town, and I said, “You’d better watch out if you come down here. You better have a bodyguard,” that could simply mean that there’re a lot of people around that would be willing to hurt you. In Helms’ case, he could simply mean that many people in NC hated Clinton enough to commit bodily harm. I don’t disbelieve that Helms would’ve made a direct threat, but that quote by itself is unconvincing. Sofa King:
Can you please provide evidence that the reason for Sen. Helms’ opposition to AIDS funding was in order to kill gays? As opposed to, say, because he thought the money was better served going elsewhere?
Yeah, I fail to empathize. Not because I don’t understand hatred - after all, there’re a number of people on these boards who have expressed utter contempt and loathing for Republicans, whom they feel are incontravertibly evil - but because being hated still doesn’t excuse wishing someone dead. DanielWithrow:
I’m sorry, but what? Opposition to the ICC has resulted in “lots and lots of people dying horribly”? In order for anything you’ve listed above to be a valid reason for hating Helms so thoroughly, you would need to demonstrate that the cause for his opposition of or support for these policies was specifically to cause these deaths. Or else, he simply didn’t care about the deaths, and the gains to be had from these policies would be perceived by any ration person as being insignificant, relative to the costs.
And could you or someone else please expand upon the numerous “other cases” that spawned so much death?
Honestly, I think Helms is an ass myself, but the effort made here to portray him as some force of utter evil is pretty lackluster, thus far.
Jeff
You’ve misinterpreted what I was saying about the ICC: I wasn’t saying it was a case that caused “lots and lots of people to die horribly,” but rather, it was one of the awful things he had done, and some of the other awful things were cases that caused “lots and lots of people to die horribly.”
I don’t accept the second part of what you say. Jesse Helms supported some horrific regimes that tortured and murdered thousands of people. If he or you want to show us that that he was justified, that’s your onus: it’s not up to me to explain his motives in supporting murderers in Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, and elsewhere.
Ball’s in your court. I’ve laid the evils at his feet; you want to defend him, let’s hear the justifications for (for example) lying about the Chilean secret service burning activists alive.
