That’s a terrible thing to do to a perfectly nice building

Renee Ellmers is getting busy in Congress, but don’t worry, she’s not actually suggesting solutions to any of our many problems. Grateful as I am for that, truly, I don’t feel this proposal is worthwhile. Naming the old post office on Fayetteville Street after Jesse Helms is an insult to fine architecture.

The irony in this part is beautiful: “The National Park Service says the building was the first federal government project in the South after the Civil War. The Federal Building, as it’s called in the National Registry of Historic Places, was completed in 1878.” Isn’t it great that he only seemed like a Civil War relic? If he’d actually been in the Senate at the time, there’d be no building to name for him at all.

You can read some of his choicest rantings here, but I think his, needless to say, negative take on a holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., is appropriate:

“What bothers me most about this whole scenario is that this proposal is to set up [Sen. Helms] as a role model for young Americans.

OK, I may have tweaked it. Now it works.