Imperialist and Reagan ally dies on the Fourth of July

The National Review has decided to host a circle-jerk in memory of the late Sen. Jesse Helms, a staunch conservative from North Carolina who died Friday (The Nation speculated, I hope facetiously, that he planned to die on Independence Day). This kind of hero worship bothers me no matter the alignment of the idol; I was far from pleased when The Nation and MoveOn.org uncritically extolled the virtues of Sen. Barack Obama a few months ago, notwithstanding the fact that he somehow became the standard-bearer for the progressive movement in this country. I won't be happy when The Nation holds a sad symposium reflecting on the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy, either. I know they're not going to be honest about it.

Does anyone really need talking heads from their own little ideological buddy list telling them how great some politician is (or was)? Can't said politician just put an ad on TV talking about how great they are? Why waste energy and print space on that kind of redundant applause? We rather need to know what's wrong with our politicians. Remember, these folks are trying to screw us.

Once you get past the fact that the entire post-mortem exercise is worth about the same as tailpipe exhaust, you have to start thinking about who Jesse Helms actually was. For one thing, he was a friend and political associate of Ronald Reagan, possibly my least favorite person in all of history. Helms was a stalwart opponent of civil rights, a virulent homophobe, and a prominent defender of the Reagan administration when it was caught funding Nicaraguan death squads. Helms is praised in NR for standing up to various presidents when he disagreed with them. But when it was discovered that a friend's cronies had armed terrorists in the Middle East and used the proceeds to fund terrorism in South America, he stood by his man. So what the hell good was he?

The folks at NR pour accolades on the late senator for his incessant crusade against the liberal elites of Washington. He filibustered to block their unqualified judicial appointments (!?!). He wanted to reform the United Nations (really glad he pushed that one through, huh?) and the somehow inherently anti-American State Department. He fought to reform anti-AIDS programs so that they would actually prevent the spread of the disease. It's not clear where the NR yackos got that last one. Helms was opposed to any funding for those programs, and he made no bones about why: homosexuals deserved to die for having ebil, ebil buttsekcs.

Helms also hated modern art and was a nemesis of the National Endowment for the Arts. Some egghead wants to give Keith Haring a grant so he can do his doodles on the walls of subway tunnels? That guy should be out on his ass. Caspar Weinberger sold M-16s to the Ayatollah? Well, that's so important, I can't see why it's illegal. He needs a pardon. See where Helms was coming from?

There is only one underwhelming mention of Helms's racial prejudice in the crop of eulogies, and it is phrased as follows: "I don’t know that he was completely innocent on race." The crowning element of this exuberant echo chamber is good, old exceptionalist nationalism. Helms knew what America was all about, so his support for our brutal and anti-democratic foreign policy was justified. After repeating that suggestion, David Rouzer closes the symposium with a masterful amalgamation of insipid supersition and saccharine patriotism: "It is only fitting that he joins two other great patriots, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, in exiting this world on the Fourth of July — and not by coincidence."