Trent Lott's racist outburst. I'm only beginning to catch up on incoming Senate majority leader Trent Lott's shocking statements of last Thursday in which he slobbered over that ancient segregationist Strom Thurmond and waxed nostalgic over the good ol' days of good ol' boys, separate rest rooms for them coloreds, and crosses burning in the night.

At a 100th-birthday party for Thurmond, Lott lauded the Methuselah-like bigot's 1948 campaign for president:

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.

As commentators from conservative Andrew Sullivan to liberal Joe Conason have noted, Lott's got to go. Conason thinks there's no chance that George W. Bush will speak up for decency, and he's probably right -- but this would be a perfect opportunity for the president to put a little distance between himself and the more retrograde elements of his party on Capitol Hill.

Anyway, Sullivan's been all over this. And Conason expresses the appropriate outrage that the so-called liberal media have gutlessly given Lott a pass on this not-uncharacteristic outburst.