Another old fart here. Yeah, I remember it too. That motherfucker. If it involved human rights of any kind, he was fully against it. And I'm still fucking salty about all that hateful "AIDS quarantine" shit that rolled out of his mouth.

But I temporarily lived in his district for a time right before his retirement, when he was visibly going downhill, and even then local people revered him. This is not an exaggeration. I didn't get it until somebody explained it to me.

Simply put, Jesse Helms -- and Strom Thurmond too, come to think of it -- took constituent services to a very quietly insane level. The number of people I personally met who were like, "Yeah, so-and-so had this problem, Senator Helms took care of it, we'll always be grateful," would blow your mind. EVERYBODY had either had his office help them personally, or knew someone who had.

That's why the rural folks who literally believe that someone like Trump personally cares about them can still think that: this is what they've lived with. Someone like Jesse Helms who was a snake in a skin suit but if you called his office, he took care of you and you gave him your undying, eternal allegiance.

That actually gives me a tiny bit of hope, because it's only the much older legislators that do anything like that kind of constituent services now. The new ones are just riding on their fumes, and even those are running out.