Politico: “To many on the right, it was Helms, not Reagan, who was the true heart of the conservative movement.”

Mitch McConnell: “Today we lost a senator whose stature in Congress had few equals, . . . Senator Jesse Helms was a leading voice and courageous champion for the many causes he believed in.”

Jesse Helms: “The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that’s thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men’s rights.”

Of course as tends to be the case with Helms’ most repugnantly racist bile, he said that a good ways back in the past. But even at that time, most Americans managed not to be repugnant racists. But not Helms. And unlike a lot of people who did take the white supremacist line in the 1950s and 60s, Helms never apologized and, indeed, never backed down doing things like mounting a filibuster against making Martin Luther King Day into a federal holiday. Remarkably, mainstream American conservatives are eager to tell us that this man is their hero. Even more remarkably, you sometimes hear conservatives talk about reaching out to black voters.

CNN’s Late Edition celebrated its 10th anniversary today by re-airing some of Wolf Blitzer’s key interviews with Bush administration officials about the Iraq war. Some highlights:

GOV. BUSH: If at any time I found that the Iraqis were developing weapons of mass destruction, they wouldn’t exist anymore. [Jan. 2000]

RICE: There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Saddam] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. [Sept. 2002]

RUMSFELD: There is no question but that there are fabricators that operate in the intelligence world, and there’s also no question you can find intelligence reports on every side of every issue. [Nov. 2005]

CHENEY: You can go back and argue the whole thing all over again, Wolf, but what we did in Iraq in taking down Saddam Hussein was exactly the right thing to do. [Jan. 2007]

Watch it:

On Fox News Sunday, Fred Barnes argued that war in Iraq is “so much more important” than the war in Afghanistan. Iraq is a “country in the heart of the Middle East, one of the most important countries there, an oil-producing country.” He added, “Compare that with there’s a Taliban offensive in southeastern Afghanistan. You talk about the middle of nowhere!” Watch it:

Barnes also inadvertently endorsed a “permanent” occupation in Iraq, but then quickly corrected himself to say “small American contingent.”

Today is President Bush’s 62nd birthday. The AP reports that White House staff celebrated the birthday aboard Air Force One, where they presented Bush with the gift of a “wooden box“:

The party for birthday on Sunday was informal; the gift was not. The staff presented him with a wooden box made from a giant oak tree that fell on the White House lawn in 2007. Some of the wood from the tree, planted by Benjamin Harrison’s daughter in 1892, had been sent to Texas to be fashioned into a box about 12-by-18 inches. They filled it with notes and cards from members of his senior staff.