He was a major defender of the tobacco industry in his home state of North Carolina (motto: "Smoke 'em if you got 'em!")
He cited some dubious photography work from Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano - two controversial artists who used offensive imagery - as an excuse to attack the National Endowment for the Arts, which funded Mapplethorpe and Serrano exhibits.
He used his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to promote a foreign policy of supporting fascist dictatorships who shared his distaste for Communism and withholding funds for the United Nations.
He blocked legislation and appointments with broad bipartisan support through his committee chairmanships. Among his causalities - William Weld, a Republican governor of Massachusetts who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, to be ambassador to Mexico.
He was a pioneering right-wing talk radio in North Carolina in the fifties. As a talk radio host, he said that UNC - the University of North Carolina - stood for "University of Negroes and Communists."
He pioneered modern negative political campaigning.
He opposed all sorts of civil rights legislation: He called the 1964 Civil Rights Act as the most dangerous domestic legislation ever conceived, and he opposed the Martin Luther King,. Jr. holiday on the grounds that King was a Communist sympathizer.
He opposed gun control and legal abortion.
How anti-Communist was he? Among the programs he considered communistic: Roosevelt's New Deal, Truman's Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy's New Frontier, and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.
And finally, a direct quote from Jesse Helms circa 1956, responding to criticism that a fictional black character in his newspaper column was offensive:
"To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn't have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing."
What? :-O
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment