The cluelessness of Republicans about their own racism never ceases to amaze. Remember back in 2002 when Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) was caught on tape at a 100th birthday celebration for Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), yearning for what life could have been if Thurmond had won the presidency in 1948 on a single-plank platform of preventing civil rights for African-Americans:

It was George Bush, not the wolfpack of the press, who forced Lott to stand down as Senate majority leader.

“I want to say this about my state: when Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”

Lott is leaving the Senate now to cash in as a high-priced lobbyist. During farewell speeches on the Senate floor Tuesday, Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) insisted that Lott’s pro-segregation statement misinterpreted:

[His] words were misconstrued, words which we had heard him utter many times in his big warm-heartedness trying to make one of our colleagues, Strom Thurmond, feel good at 100 years old. We knew what he meant. But the wolfpack of the press circled around him, sensed blood in the water, and the exigencies of politics caused a great injustice…”

Leaving aside the fact that Thurmond was barely sentient and thus unable to “feel good” at the time, it’s telling that Lott had “uttered” similar pro-segregation sentiments to his Republican colleagues “many times,” and that none of these GOP pols ever bothered to say, “Hey, Trent, your white sheet is showing.”

Of course, Sen. Smith is wrong about the source of Trent Lott’s troubles over his pro-segregationist remarks. It was George Bush, not the wolfpack of the press, who forced Lott to stand down as Senate majority leader.