Precisely one good thing happened to America this July 4, the arbitrarily selected pretend "birthday" of our cursed nation: a vile bigot died at a very, very old age. While the country as a whole would've decidedly been better served by his having died many decades ago (we came so close!), it is at least some small comfort that former Senator Jesse Helms spent his last miserable years suffering from dementia alone in a nursing home. But don't take our word for it! The internet is alive with vitriol directed against the dead old bastard. Join us on a tour!

  • "He was mean, cheap, petty and unloved. He was the ugliest kind of bigot and a stain on America. Anybody who says different is a liar." -Ken Layne
  • "But it would be dishonest to pretend that Jesse Helms was anything other than a caricature of a Southern bigot." -Nick Denton
  • "Far too late for it to do anybody any good, Jesse Helms has died. He has done so on Independence Day, which, since he was born too late to own slaves and in too liberal an age to allow him to outlaw sedition, will forever be his only resemblance to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams." -Hendrik Hertzberg
  • "To die on the Fourth of July, one can perhaps be forgiven for feeling, is or ought to be a privilege reserved for men of the stamp of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom expired on that day in 1826, 50 years after the promulgation of the declaration. One doesn't want the occasion sullied by the obsequies for a senile racist buffoon." -Christopher Hitchens
  • "He both reflected and shaped, and helped legitimate and enshrine, a metastasizing array of virulent anti-democratic forces in American politics in the post World War II period." -Lisa Duggan, The Nation
  • "I seem to recall Jim Hunt trying to make hay of Senator Jesse Helms' ties to Salvadoran death squad macher Roberto d'Aubuisson, and that didn't work out so well. 1968 is in the punters' minds as far away and irrelevant as El Salvador. Helms' operatives did better calling Hunt 'SISSY, PRISSY, GIRLISH AND EFFEMINATE.' If you're going to go with the classics, go with classics that work!" -Roy Edroso
  • Today, we're hearing through a "contact" at the Mayview Convalescent Center in Raleigh - where Helms died and spent his last rotten years - that the nursing home deliberately falsified the time of death, probably on orders from the Jesse Helms Center. If true, this proves that Jesse Helms actually went to Hell on the gay-lesbian-black Marxist July 3 holiday, "Juneteenth." -Wonkette
  • "This is one person I will not be sorry has left this life to be judged finally by the God above. He was a devisive, bigoted caveman who had no fotting in any century esp the one he lived in." -Commenter ToBeFree

No fotting indeed. See you in hell, Jesse!