Ding dong the witch is dead.

August 21, 2001 12:43 PM

Ding dong the witch is dead. Tomorrow, Jesse Helms will announce his retirement. Unfortunately, he has two more years left to his term
posted by mudbug (16 comments total)

And a possible replacement is Liddy Dole.
posted by rschram at 1:16 PM on August 21, 2001

Now if Strom Thurmond will finally kick the bucket people will stop making fun of my beloved Carolinas.
posted by auzten at 1:19 PM on August 21, 2001

Please, for the love of god, let this be true. I've felt so embarrassed and angered to have this man at the head of the foreign relations committee for so long. His record makes me want to weep. The only thing scarier than his positions on Minorities, Aids sufferers, etc. is the number of people willing to elect such a man and keep him there.
With the heavy undercurrent (undertow?) of right wing politics and puritanical social stances in the states I have to say that I often feel completely out of step... I know he's just the tip of the iceberg, a figurehead and spokesman for a set of values widely accepted here in the States, but I will be thrilled if he retires from political life.
posted by kahboom at 1:28 PM on August 21, 2001

The only thing scarier than his positions on Minorities, Aids sufferers, etc. is the number of people willing to elect such a man and keep him there.

As long as their local pork barrel stays full, most constituents will re-elect almost anyone regardless of their ideology or sleaze factor.
posted by MrBaliHai at 1:43 PM on August 21, 2001

Was anyone else surprised by the statement "a former Democrat..."?
posted by witchstone at 1:50 PM on August 21, 2001

Was anyone else surprised by the statement "a former Democrat..."?

Rumor has it that he switched parties around the same time that the Earth switched magnetic polarity. Fortunately for Jesse, evil knows no party lines.

Nah, I'm just kiddin' ya'll. Republicans are way more evil than Democrats. :)
posted by Optamystic at 2:21 PM on August 21, 2001

According to this timeline, Helms was a Democrat until 1970. Many 'Southern Democrats' swapped allegiances as their party became more involved in the Civil Rights Movement, including the aforementioned Senator Thurmond.

I wonder who's happier about him retiring after this term . . . Democrats or moderate Republicans.
posted by alan at 2:54 PM on August 21, 2001

Was anyone else surprised by the statement "a former Democrat..."?

It should have read "former socialist".
posted by feckless at 2:56 PM on August 21, 2001

I'll miss him. He had the courage to be right when everyone around him was dead wrong. I guess that makes me either a contrarian or just plain evil on this board.
posted by Erendadus at 2:57 PM on August 21, 2001

"He had the courage to be right"

Ahh, nice to see that absolutism isn't dead!
(and, BTW, he wasn't right -- I am. Everyone else is wrong, except insofar as they agree with me.)
posted by aramaic at 3:12 PM on August 21, 2001

As someone who grew up in NC, and thinks of it as home, this comes as a great relief. The man was embarassing. In 1996 I worked with the group that illegally plastered Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Durham, Charlotte, and other NC towns with some posters done by guerilla poster artist Robbie Conal. We didn't achieve squat, but it's nice to know that he'll finally be gone.
posted by jammer at 3:13 PM on August 21, 2001

With all the celebration of Jesse Helms' departure you'd think the Senate was rid of a member of the KKK.
posted by Real9 at 6:51 PM on August 21, 2001

I really think this picture says it all.
posted by zztzed at 9:13 PM on August 21, 2001

i never thought this day would come. and why should i?

strom thurmond is still alive. certainly not kicking, but alive.

but tomorrow, hopefully, i'll know that 2 years from now i'll get the chance to "throw my vote away" on whomever i choose for my own reasons, instead of voting for the candidate "most-likely-to-have-some-sort-of-chance-in-hell" to defeat helms. well, at least it will seem like i have more freedom at the polls...

so if it's true, hooray! someone schedule a parade! but if it's not, i'm not surprised one bit. however, i'm even beginning to think it's really true this time. probably because the (sur?)real possibility of this has started to bother me:

elizabeth dole (R-NC)

huh?

i'm not trying to downplay her personal accomplishments, which are many in the political arena. but what, if anything, has she done for the "community" of nc, which she is very possibly preparing to represent, recently? ever? i ask this hoping there's an answer, but i fear there isn't one. as a native north carolinian who is still here, nothing is blipping on my e-dole radar currently.

looks like it's back to the "most-likely-to-have-some-sort-of-chance-in-hell" to defeat [insert republican candidate with fatter coffers here] voting system.
posted by basmati at 10:19 PM on August 21, 2001

If Dole does run it'll be interesting to see if she receives the same kind of treatment Clinton did in New York.
posted by alan at 10:55 PM on August 21, 2001

clinton and dole's potential run at the NC senatorship is interesting to me. have districts and states been hijacked for their political value as they have in those two high-profile examples in the past? i would ask how residents of the state would feel, but that is the point of the voting process, so there is no need.
posted by moz at 11:33 PM on August 21, 2001