Former North Carolina senator Jesse Helms died Friday. Helms was a rambunctious, pugnacious and extraordinarily conservative American. He was not, as CNN reports, an icon for conservatives. His ideas on affirmative action, women’s rights and AIDS were offensive to the cultural norm. On the other hand, he was all for withholding funds for the UN.

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Naaah, even that’s not good enough to weigh Heaven’s scales in his favor. Though the teary meeting with Bono, in which he was preached to by a rock star like a Baptist minister to a bucktooth moonshining whoring redneck, does help.