Ross Douthat, making sense:
"He simply was an awful bigot, and worse he was an awful bigot who never expressed a shred of remorse, so far as I know, for his toxic approach to issues ranging from civil rights to HIV to foreign affairs. Far from being the sort of politicians who conservatives ought to defend, out of a sense of issue-by-issue solidarity, he's the sort of politician conservatives ought to carefully distance themselves from, because his political style brought (and continues to bring) intellectual disrepute to almost every cause with which he was associated... I'm happy to defend Helms' views on a variety of issues, but the man himself has no business in the right-wing pantheon, and the conservatives who have used his death as an occasion to argue that he does are doing their movement a grave disservice.I'm not going to call the conservative movement racist; I'm sure most of them are not. But whether it's Hannity constantly making excuses for Imus and Mel Gibson and the like, or National Review praising Jesse Helms to the skies, they do seem awfully willing to excuse bigotry, and treat it like it's not such a big deal. Posted by Stephen Silver at July 7, 2008 08:41 PM