Good fucking riddance.

Conservatives admired him for his opposition to abortion and what he called “indecent art,” while liberals accused him of using race as a wedge issue to defeat black opponents.

Helms opposed civil rights and a holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He was one of a small number of senators who opposed extending the Voting Rights Act in 1982, eventually giving up a filibuster when then-Majority Leader Sen. Howard Baker, a Tennessee Republican, said the Senate would not take up any other business until it acted on the extension.

Helms also opposed letting niggers vote or queers breathe, which is what really endeared him to conservatives. He represented the basest and meanest instincts in American politics, which made him a perfect embodiment of Republican politics that last couple of decades. There was a time when having voted against the Voting Rights Act would have branded a politician as a dangerous kook; now, however, he’s a venerated conservative:

“Today we lost a senator whose stature in Congress had few equals,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate’s Republican leader. “Sen. Jesse Helms was a leading voice and courageous champion for the many causes he believed in.”

No, we lost a hateful bigot and demagogue who was committed to preserving racial divides and inequality. And a conservative icon.

MORE: Reactions to Helms’s long overdue demise.

Patterico is upset about insufficient respect being paid to a racist, homophobic hate-monger, to the point of mental incontinence — claiming TBogg hearts terrorists. Only a truly vapid asshole could connect those two thoughts.

American Power is similarly upset — because “common decency” demands we pretend that Helms wasn’t a vile specimen of humanity. Perhaps if Helms had exhibited a bit of common decency towards those targeted by his prejudices, he’d have a point.

And last (and possibly least) President 23% mis-remembers Jesse (”The University of Negroes and Communists” . . . “They should ask their parents if it would be all right for their son or daughter to marry a Negro” . . . “The New York Times and Washington Post are both infested with homosexuals themselves. Just about every person down there is a homosexual or lesbian.” . . . “Homosexuals are weak, morally sick wretches.”) Helms as: “a kind, decent and humble man and a passionate defender of what he called ‘the Miracle of America” [ed: unless you happened to be a nigger or a queer] and a “great patriot.”

Or was it seven words. . . . George Carlin dies.

I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but there is language in this video. . .

President Dumbshit, today:

“Any government that presumes to represent the majority of people must confront criminal elements or people who think they can live outside the law,” Bush said at the White House.

How he managed to find the time to wedge that statement in between ordering illegal wiretaps, authorizing the torture of prisoners, plotting politically-based prosecutions of Democratic politicians and executing signing statements declaring his immunity to laws passed by Congress, I’ll never know.

I can’t wait until this dumb son of a bitch is out of office:

President George W. Bush will acknowledge on Wednesday the Iraq war has been fought at a high cost but will insist a U.S. troop buildup has opened the door to a “major strategic victory” against Islamic militants.

“The successes we are seeing in Iraq are undeniable,” Bush will say in an upbeat assessment of the U.S.-led campaign in a speech marking the fifth anniversary of the war, according to excerpts released on Tuesday.

~~~

“The surge has done more than turn the situation in Iraq around — it has opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror,” Bush will say.

Mission fucking accomplished all over again.

Obviously, President Dumbshit hasn’t a clue about what the word “strategic” means. He invaded a country with no connection to al Qaida and its network of Islamic terrorists in order to topple a regime which was both frightened of and hostile to radical Islamists it viewed as a serious threat, and who in turn viewed Iraq’s corrupt, brutal, Baathist dictator as a heretic marked for death.

By toppling the regime and destabilizing the country and the region, Bush ignited a series of violent reactions which, according to our own National Intelligence Estimate, inspired a new series of Islamist militants and eased al Qaida’s task of recruiting more jihadists by the thousands.

Now, after an investment numbering in the trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives, the commitment of the vast majority of our military has marginally stabilized a largely failed political state in Iraq, a country which is still beset by widespread violence which can be viewed as a positive development only in light of the even more appalling levels of violence during the prior year of our occupation.

So, basically, vis a vis the Islamic militants, we’ve killed many of those our actions helped to create, we’re still militarily bogged down in Iraq, and the numbers of terrorist attacks as tallied by our own counterterrorist agencies worldwide are now measured by the tens of thousands, geometrically higher than the two hundred and eight terrorist attacks which occurred world wide in 2002, before we invaded Iraq.

So, to sum up, we’ve expended a ton of resources, turned millions of Iraqis into refugees, lost 4000 of our finest young people, and the number of terrorist attacks world wide jumped from 208 in 2002 to over 14,000 by our own last tally.

And this stupid motherfucker calls this a strategic victory?

MORE: As Bush chumbles moronically about “strategic victory” in Iraq, another strategic failure there — the latest attempt at reconciliation between warring factions is an utter failure:

A no-reconciliation conference

Influential Shiite and Sunni groups boycotted a conference on Iraqi reconciliation Tuesday, as U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney traveled north to meet with Kurdish leaders.

Members of the main Sunni Arab parliament coalition, Tawafiq, refused to attend the two-day meeting because of complaints about the Shiite-dominated government.

Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr’s bloc walked out of the conference, saying it did not want a ceremonial presence. The same went for a contingent led by Sheik Ali Hatem Sulaiman, a representative of Sunni Muslim tribes that rose up against the Sunni insurgent group Al Qaeda in Iraq.

The boycott was symptomatic of the rifts and enmity among Iraqi parties, which are organized along ethnic and religious lines and have delayed progress in power sharing between the country’s Shiite majority and the formerly ruling Sunnis.

~~~

Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s government has dwindled since last summer to a core group of Shiite and Kurdish politicians. But the Shiite prime minister’s relationship with the Kurds has become strained over matters such as Iraq’s stalled oil legislation and the country’s northern boundaries.

Maliki’s detractors describe him as being hindered by an inner circle that does not like to share power and is fiercely sectarian. His supporters argue that he is trying to build a strong government and that other parties are standing in the way for selfish reasons.

PGA Tour golfer Tripp Isenhour was charged with killing a hawk on purpose with a golf shot because it was making noise as he videotaped a TV show.

According to court documents, Isenhour got upset when a red-shouldered hawk began making noise, forcing another take. He began hitting balls at the bird, then 300 yards away, but gave up.

Isenhour started again when the hawk moved within about 75 yards, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officer Brian Baine indicated in a report.

Isenhour allegedly said “I’ll get him now,” and aimed for the hawk.

“About the sixth ball came very near the bird’s head, and [Isenhour] was very excited that it was so close,” Baine wrote.

A few shots later, witnesses said he hit the hawk. The bird, protected as a migratory species, fell to the ground bleeding from both nostrils.

9/11/2001 - 1/30/2008

“They took the bar, the whole fucking bar.”

In what can only be described as a crime against nature, hundreds of bottles of Jack Daniels — some of it a century old — might be poured down the drain.

Channel 4 News in Nashville has the story:

Here’s a sobering thought: Hundreds of bottles of Jack Daniel’s whiskey, some of it almost 100 years old, may be unceremoniously poured down a drain because authorities suspect it was being sold by someone without a license.

Officials seized 2,400 bottles late last month during warehouse raids in Nashville and Lynchburg, the southern Tennessee town where the whiskey is distilled.

“Punish the person, not the whiskey,” said an outraged Kyle MacDonald, 28, a Jack Daniel’s drinker from British Columbia who promotes the whiskey on his blog. “Jack never did anything wrong, and the whiskey itself is innocent.”

Indeed, Mr. MacDonald, the whiskey is innocent.

The whiskey never hurt anyone.

In fact, it may be argued that the whiskey has life-sustaining powers more powerful than any herb, vitamin or elixir.

Issues of health aside, the disposing of century-old Jack Daniels that never hurt anyone and exists only to bring a little light into our otherwise bleak lives is a sin. I liken it to burning perfectly good weed, just because someone was selling it illegally.

Think of the good work that could be done with the whiskey. Think of the money that could be raised by auctioning it off. Think of the spirits that could be lifted simply by letting bloggers in L.A. drink it.

I’ve got a friend with Kansas City connections. And every time he returns from the Midwest, he brings me a bottle of Jack, from a vintage not available easily in Los Angeles. How I look forward to that first, smooth sip … it’s mother’s milk.

Tonight, I’ll go home and pour myself a few fingers of the amber liquid. And I’ll lift the glass to my lips and drink, slowly to savor the smooth taste. And as I roll my friend Jack around my mouth before swallowing, I’ll say a little prayer for innocent whiskey wasted.

From the Times piece on Bush’s approval of torture:

After the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the Geneva Conventions applied to prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda, President Bush for the first time acknowledged the C.I.A.’s secret jails and ordered their inmates moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The C.I.A. halted its use of waterboarding, or pouring water over a bound prisoner’s cloth-covered face to induce fear of suffocation.

But in July, after a monthlong debate inside the administration, President Bush signed a new executive order authorizing the use of what the administration calls “enhanced” interrogation techniques — the details remain secret — and officials say the C.I.A. again is holding prisoners in “black sites” overseas. The executive order was reviewed and approved by Mr. Bradbury and the Office of Legal Counsel.

The arrogance of these people is just staggering. Told by no less an authority than the Supreme Court of the United States that what they are doing is illegal, the Bush administration publicly discontinues the illegal practice — then reinitiates the same illegality in secret.

The significance of this cannot be understated. Legal Positivist H.L.A. Hart, in The Concept of Law, described the complex interplay between what he called primary and secondary rules of law — the first being laws of command, the second being the laws which determine how primary rules are created, modified, interpreted, or abolished.

What the Bush administration has done has gone far beyond simply breaking the law; his brazen acts erode the very means by which America has, for centuries, formulated and administered its system of laws. This administration no longer recognizes Marbury v. Madison, which posited that the Supreme Court was the ultimate arbiter of what is and what isn’t law, as legitimate. He has arrogated that to the executive branch, and his contempt for our system of laws, and the notion that we are a nation of laws and not men, is manifest.