Jan 13
1985.
Satire turned Reality.
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1985.
Satire turned Reality.
Jesse Helms (1921-2008) Physique: Husky Build Height: 6'3" (1.91 m)
Jesse Alexander Helms Jr. was an American journalist, media executive, and politician. A leader in the conservative movement, he served as a senator from North Carolina from 1973 to 2003. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1995 to 2001 he had a major voice in foreign policy. Helms helped organize and fund the conservative resurgence in the 1970s, focusing on Ronald Reagan's quest for the White House as well as helping many local and regional candidates. Helms died of vascular dementia at the age of 86.
I'm pretty sure most of you will just say no to him because he is a racist, divisive, pro-government (when it favors the wealthy) and anti-democratic. And I kinda agree with you, but back in the 90s, I didn't know anything about him. Now that I do, I can use him as fodder for my angry j/o fantasies where I can bestow all manner of perverse and nasty sexual acts that I would feel bad about doing to a nice person. Like six black guys built like Terry Crews blasting his starfish wide open. What? That sounds hot.
The line from Helms to Trump
The line from Helms to Trump
Last night, Liz Cheney lost her primary to Trump–backed Republican Harriet Hageman. Hageman is typical of a lot of Republicans. She supported Cheney for years and, according the Washington Post, she “opposed Trump, calling him ‘racist and xenophobic’” in 2016. Now, she’s worshipping at the Alter of Trump. Of course, Hageman was right in 2016. And Donald Trump certainly hasn’t changed since then.…
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Carlson said that Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos had been conducting “opposition research.”
Painting of Jesse Helms by Bill Sienkiewicz for a political trading card series from Eclipse, circa 1990.
Sound Bites Suggests: Top 10 Songs for the Trump Era
The Donald Trump era has been a shit show wrapped in a clusterfuck populated by assholes. There aren’t enough goddam words in the English language to adequately express the amount of bullshit that cock-sucking mother fucker has put this country through.
But we do have songs - some old, some new - that help to put this turd bucket in some kind of context. Here, then, are Sound Bites’ top-10 songs for the Trump Abomination (not a typo).
No. 10 - “Vote that Fucker Out” by Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby (2020)
Nearly four years of this shit/there isn’t any doubt/the only way to end this misery/we gotta vote that fucker out, the duo sing on this punky rant.
And guess what? We fucking did it.
No. 9 - “Send in the Clowns” by Judy Collins (1975)
And guess what? He fucking did it.
Rudy. Huckabee. Spicer. Pompeo. Jared. The daughter he wants to plook. Pence. A goddam clown car.
No. 8 - “Death on Two Legs” (Dedicated to ...)” by Queen (1975)
... Donald Trump - you’re a sewer rat decaying in a cesspool - or swamp, if you will - of pride.
No. 7 - “Jesse” by Todd Rundgren (1991)
Recorded, bootlegged and played live, but never officially released, this song is Rundgren saying a spirited Fuck you to Jesse Helms, Tipper Gore and the pope. He recently recorded the anti-Trump anthem “Tin Foil Hat” with Donald Fagen, but “Jesse” is due for an update.
No. 6 - “Brown Shirts” by John Gorka (1992)
Brown shirts here in the White House/brown shirts up on top of the hill/brown shirts can you hear them marching/I swear they are marching still/brown shirts for the good of the country/brown shirts pride all over the land/brown shirts give us law and order/you’ll know when you raise your hands
Gorka’s a fucking clairvoyant.
No. 5 - “Conservative Christian, Right Wing Republican, Straight, White, American Males” by Todd Snider (2004)
The title says it all, expect for the part about how many of these dudes have had a penis in their mouth or asshole recently.
And there’s nothing wrong with choosing to have a penis in your mouth or asshole.
It’s the fucking hypocrisy that pisses off Sound Bites.
No. 4 - “Let’s Impeach the President” by Neil Young (2006)
And you know what? We fucking did it.
Fucking twice.
No. 3 - “Gimme Some Truth” by John Lennon (1971)
Lennon speaks for 84 million Americans when he says:
I’m sick and tired of hearing things/from uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocritics/all I want is the truth/just gimme some truth/I had enough of reading things/about neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians/all I want is the truth/just give us the truth
We’re counting on you, Joe.
No. 2 - “The Things We Do to Each Other” by Cowboy Junkies (2018)
Fear is not so far from hate/so if you get the folks to fear/it only takes one small twist/to kick up a gear/and you can control hate/but only for so long/and when you lose control/oh man, Margo Timmins sings, proving the Junkies are fucking clairvoyants just like fucking Gorka.
No. 1 - “Dickie’s Such an Asshole” by Frank Zappa (Multiple Versions)
Originally written for Richard Nixon and updated for Ronald Reagan, this bitter Fuck off is perfectly suited for the Orange Menace with lines such as, One and one is 11, two and two is 22; and, I just wanna lie about one more thing right now.
And if Zappa was still here, it’d end thusly:
They’re all the same so sing right along/Donald’s such an ass-hole!
Sincerely Don, we mean it.
1/14/21
NEW YORK [August 14, 1989] — In response to an increased threat to federal funding of controversial and erotic art, members and supporters of the arts community staged a protest on Wednesday evening, August 2 [1989] in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The two-hour demonstration was arranged by Art Positive, an organization which fights homophobia and censorship of the arts. The protest included a makeshift rally in front of the museum, and was followed by a meeting to discuss further actions.
Demonstrators expressed outrage at an amendment proposed by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC), passed by the Senate on July 26 [1989], which seeks to prohibit the use of federal funds to support "obscene or indecent materials." The amendment came just two weeks after the House of Representatives cut the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts, which had supported controversial exhibits by Andres Serrano and the late gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Afterwards, demonstrators adjourned to the Dia Foundation for a planning meeting, where they found police waiting for them outside of the building, at 155 Mercer Street. Art Positive's Bill Dobbs said that the police tried to enter the meeting to find out who was in charge.
— Mark Chesnut, OutWeek Magazine No. 8, August 14, 1989, p. 25. Photos by Tom McKitterick and Desi Del Valle.
This will be the defining battle of the next six months—and maybe the next six decades.
For a fleeting optimistic moment last Thursday, it looked like the institutions of the U.S. government might actually be up to the task of keeping Donald Trump’s menace in check.
It was a small victory, but meaningful nonetheless: U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, that chamber’s only black Republican, announced that he wouldn’t vote to confirm Thomas Farr to the U.S. District Court in Eastern North Carolina. And with that, Farr’s nomination was dead.
In a saner world — a world in which a white nationalist reality TV star wasn’t president and the U.S. Senate wasn’t stacked with quiescent quislings — it would have never been born. After all, Farr has spent decades working to suppress black votes. He was the lead campaign attorney for the unrepentant segregationist senator Jesse Helms. In 1990, the Helms’ campaign mailed out more than one hundred thousand postcards threatening black residents with prison if they voted; there’s also evidence that Farr lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee last year about that postcard effort. Years later, North Carolina’s GOP-controlled legislature hired Farr to defend its unconstitutional racial gerrymanders and a voter ID law that a federal court said targeted African Americans “with almost surgical precision.”
In the end, decency prevailed, albeit barely.
Just a few hours later, however, that fleeting optimistic moment evaporated — another North Carolina story did it — when news broke that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had deported a man named Samuel Oliver-Bruno. There are two things that make Oliver-Bruno’s deportation so infuriating. The first is the circumstance in which it happened: In short, he was entrapped by the government’s duplicity, and for no good reason. For the last year, Oliver-Bruno had been seeking sanctuary inside a church. Immigration officials told him that, for his in-process asylum claim to proceed, they needed to record biometric information. When he showed up, ICE’s goons literally tacked and arrested him, and days later he was sent back to Mexico.
The second is Oliver-Bruno’s life story, which illustrates how callous and fundamentally capricious our immigration system is and has become under Trump. Oliver-Bruno lived in North Carolina for two decades, but returned to Mexico in 2011 to care for his ailing father. A few years later, his wife became gravely ill and flew to the U.S. for a life-saving operation. When Oliver-Bruno tried to join her, he was detained by the Border Patrol, which gave him a stay of removal on account of his wife’s condition and released him with a work permit and driver’s license.
Then, a new president took office. And last year, when Oliver-Bruno went to get his permit renewed, he was told that he now had an active order of deportation. Not wanting to leave his still-ill wife or American-born child behind, he entered sanctuary in a Durham church, and didn’t leave until ICE conned him. Officials in Durham and members of North Carolina’s congressional delegation begged ICE not to deport him, to no avail.
Cruelty — pointless, mean, racist — won the day. There was nothing a unified chorus of residents and elected officials could do to stop it, a reminder of the power invested in even this most malignant of presidencies.
By the next morning, it was becoming clear that the American system is quickly toward another stress test, this one bigger, more existential: Can our institutions provide a bulwark against a president desperate to hide his crimes?
That the Trump campaign colluded with Russian agents is now apparent. So too is the reality that the president repeatedly lied to the American public about his business relationships with Russia — and possibly to Special Counsel Robert Mueller as well. The plea agreement with former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, which hinted that Mueller has evidence of extensive communications between the Kremlin and the Trump Organization, followed a filing — probably not coincidentally made shortly after Trump submitted his written answers to Mueller’s questions — in which Mueller voided former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s plea agreement, accusing him of lying to the FBI, which itself comes amid a wave of reports that conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi and Trump buddy Roger Stone are about to be indicted, and speculation that Donald Trump Jr. could be next.
By all appearances, the walls are closing in. Trump won’t take this lying down, of course. He’s already installed a lackey as acting attorney general, has a compliant Senate majority, and has a full-on right-wing propaganda mill willing to distort and distract and outright lie to serve the president’s needs.
This will be the defining battle of the next six months — and perhaps the next six decades. Between the Mueller investigation and the deluge of subpoenas sure to come from the newly Democratic House, it’s possible we’ll see a mass of evidence not just of obstruction or even collusion, but also campaign finance fraud (e.g., conspiring to pay off Stormy Daniels) and who knows what in Trump’s business dealings.
If this evidence emerges and Trump escapes accountability regardless, then America will have failed its most important stress test since at least Nixon, perhaps since the Civil War. A corrupt president will have prevailed over a system designed to ensure that wouldn’t happen.
That possibility — or maybe probability — would have implications for long after Donald Trump becomes worm food.
Contact editor in chief Jeffrey C. Billman by email at [email protected], by phone at 919-286-1972, or on Twitter @jeffreybillman.
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