Cracka, please.

Jesse Helms, my senator for 30 years, has "written" his memoirs. As is so often the case when a career bigot and hatemonger nears the end of his life, Helms is trying to soften his deservedly repulsive image and the news stories are mostly focused on his admission that he was wrong about AIDS. It's being played as an apology, but if you look at his words, he's pretty clear that he's only sorry that he opposed funding because it turned out not to be restricted to queers and junkies.

But in his final years in the Senate, Helms said his views evolved because of old friends such as North Carolina evangelist Franklin Graham and new ones such as rock singer Bono, both of whom got him involved in the fight against the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

"Until then," Helms writes, "it had been my feeling that AIDS was a disease largely spread by reckless and voluntary sexual and drug-abusing behavior, and that it would probably be confined to those in high risk populations. I was wrong."

Shorter Jesse: "My bad, y'all. I didn't realize that people God doesn't hate might get it. I guess not everybody deserved it after all." Anyhow, even when he's trying to burnish his image, the old racist still comes shining through the gauzy lens filter.

"I did not advocate segregation, and I did not advocate aggravation," Helms writes. "By that I mean that I thought it was wrong for people who did not know, and who did not care, about the relationships between neighbors and friends to force their ideas about how communities should work on the people who had built those communities in the first place. I believed right would prevail as people followed their own consciences."

"We will never know how integration might have been achieved in neighborhoods across our land, because the opportunity was snatched away by outside agitators who had their own agendas to advance. We certainly do know the price paid by the stirring of hatred, the encouragement of violence, the suspicion and distrust. We do know that too many lives were lost, businesses were destroyed, millions of dollars were diverted from books and teachers to support the cost of buses and gasoline. We do know that turning our public schools into social laboratories almost destroyed them."

You did not advocate segregation? Here's one of the ads Helms helped write for Willis Smith in 1950: "White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races." Hmmm, sounds pretty segregationist to this alumnus of the school you referred to on air as the University of Negroes and Communists.

Helms' health has been awful for years and I doubt he's got much time before he checks out. As with Nixon, you'll be seeing plenty of glossing over the uncomfortable but well-documented truth in an attempt to try to paint him as an admired conservative statesman. Don't believe it. He is a disgrace to our state and an ugly stain on the federal government. Even a clearly-in-over-her-head empty suit like Elizabeth Dole is a vast improvement. Good riddance, Jesse. You won't be missed. Now just go away.

Update: More substantive reflections are over at The Stinging Nettle and Robust McManlyPants.