Helms was a despicable human being but now that he is no longer here to give us new soundbites into his personal hell the care givers of his legacy will always want to rewrite history to suit them.  Especially as he fades his foundation or library will become one of the only sources for information on him.  The key in these situations is keeping scum like him on the forefront in history and permanently plaster his face along side Wallace and other bigots. 

These re-writes in death are nothing new.  Everybody wants to gloss over the bad things and just focus on the good.  But what good did helms ever offer anybody?  He voted so solidly with the wealthy owning class it was pathetic.  I’m just glad he’s dead.

These are the same people who believe the Founders were evangelical Christians, who believe that the Civil War wasn’t over slavery, believe Martin Luther King Jr. was a conservative Republican, and believe George W. Bush was a big government liberal.

So I’m hardly shocked they’re once again trying to retcon history.

Wow.  That is some shameless revisionism.  I almost can’t blame them for wanting to gussy up the old boy’s image now that he can’t fuck it up further, postmortem, but damn.  Helms was a hidebound, bigoted dinosaur and proud of it.

What’s the over/under on how long Mabus, i.e. jonasthomas, will stick around?

In other news, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

What’s the over/under on how long Mabus, i.e. jonasthomas, will stick around?

I don’t know, but there’s some entertainment value in an idiot who approvingly links to a post that both threatens atheists with a “crystal night” and cites Albert Einstein.

Zifnab, I know it wasn’t the ONLY issue but that’s the short high school level 9th Grade American History 101, the LEAST thing you need to know about the Civil War—that it was mainly over slavery. Teabaggers like to pretend it wasn’t about slavery at all, that it was all about tariffs or some vague concept about “states’ rights”. They can’t even accept the 9th Grade version of history.

I haven’t meet anyone crazy enough to claim that slavery had nothing to do with it.

You don’t live in an ex-Confederate State, do you?

Sorry - rehabilitate Jesse Helms!?!  And on his LGBT record, no less!

I’m speechless - or I would be if I didn’t know people who want to rehabilitate Joe McCarthy and, yes, who argue with a straight face that the War of Northern Aggression wasn’t about slavery.

I thought it was the “War of Yankee Aggression” now.

Funny thing is, I’ve never heard anyone use the phrase “War of Northern Aggression” unless they were being at least a little tongue-in-cheek until that Republican Congressman. If he was being cute, it was lost on me.

My preferred southern term for the war is “the Late Unpleasantness”.

In all fairness, the Civil War wasn’t just over slavery.  It was a major clash between the industrial and progressive northern elites and the rural stagnant southern elites.  Slavery was the major economic engine of the south, and it was raising questions of how to handle industries like mining and factory management.  The 3/5ths compromise was rubbing a lot of northerners raw.  And we had legislative lockups on par with what we’re seeing today, but that dealt with railroad expansion and the Indian Wars and how tax dollars were distributed across the states.

Actually since most railroad expansion was done by a new class of capitalists the north got a huge distribution of railroads while the south got next to none.  That compounded with what few tax dollars were being distributed it was done so on an industrial basis.  The 3/5th compromise was little next to the previous two compromises over free and slave labor.  The republican party was that of “free labor” according to Eric Foner.  So to make slavery a front-player instead of the only player is a bit of a fallacy.  In effect all roads lead back to slavery.  You couldn’t help but run straight back to slavery over any other aspect of economy.

To call the emancipation proclamation a political move in it’s time is very questionable if verging on wrong.  The proclamation was viewed with mixed feelings and even then was considered political suicide for Lincoln even if it just did free the slaves in the south.  Whether lincoln liked slaves as people or not is really not something I can justifiably answer but I can verify Lincoln was an abolitionist.

But this is all just viewed from my point.  We can argue till the cows come home.  We’re discussing shades of gray at this point.

They should have wrapped some wire around Jesse’s corpse when they had the chance, because they could generate electricity from his spinning in his grave.

Haven’t any of the homobigots who kept voting him into office cried foul over this yet?

I bet he’d be chuckling. One more screwing-over from beyond the grave.

Are there some Log Cabin Republicans who would like to testify that the right not to drink at the same water fountain as a black person was in fact the freedom they cherished most?

I find it kind of amusing in a “he’ll be turning over in his grave if they succeed in making him look gay-friendly” kind of way.

Even after the Civil War broke out, Lincoln had less interest in freeing slaves than in bringing the Confederacy back into the fold.  The Emancipation Proclamation was a political tool to re energize his flagging political base, boost the morale of his troops, and inspire Southern slaves to revolt.  For his time, Lincoln was very moderate.
Zifnab25

This declared indifference, but, as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world-enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites-causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty-criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.

Turning Jesse Helms into a gay rights advocate is like turning Lincoln into a moderate.

I’m a bit confuzzled.

Isn’t putting “one man, one woman traditional marriage forever” a common trope the GOP uses to get out the vote?  Homophobia is their stock and trade.

So why are they trying to make Helms look like LESS of a bigot?  He’s a patron saint of bigotry!