Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott of MS has gotten himself into a world of trouble for a public statement allowing as how America would be a much better place had Strom Thurmond been elected President in 1948 on the States Rights "Dixiecrat" ticket. It didn't help that Lott made almost exactly the same statement, again in public, back in 1980 when Thurmond delivered a fiery states-rights speech in Mississippi on behalf of Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign.

After getting a lot of heat from just about every political direction, Lott has apologized at least twice, saying at one point that it was "a mistake of the head rather than the heart," an appropriation of the Rev. Jesse's Jackson's apology over his "Hymietown" gaffe of the 1980s.

Sorry, but we don't buy it. Lott is a whole lot smarter than to misunderstand what it means for a Mississippi Senator to look back fondly on the agenda of a hard-line segregationist political movement. And in fact, no southern politician over the age of 40 could make a "mistake of the head" on this subject, any more than an Iowa politician would confuse corn with cortisone.

The problem for Lott, and for Republicans generally, is that much of the racist Dixiecrat movement, including Thurmond himself, went directly into the Grand Old Party with their confederate flags flying once presidential nominee Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Some old Congressional bulls, like Rep. William Colmer, Chairman of the House Rules Committee, whom Lott served as chief of staff until his retirement in 1972, remained nominal Democrats to preserve their seniority while maintaining the same old segregationist policies of the past. But Lott, who succeeded Colmer as an open Republican, represented the transition to a two-party system in Mississippi and in many other parts of the South where the old seggies and their younger, smoother proteges almost universally moved into and took over the Party of Lincoln.

Ever since, many southern Republicans have played a coy wink-and-nod game on racial issues, eschewing the racist past but making it clear in a thousand ways to white voters that they weren't that happy about having to toe the politically correct line on civil rights. As recently as 1998, Republican statewide campaigns in Alabama and Georgia used thinly veiled racist appeals. And as recently as this year, Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate Sonny Perdue cynically exploited rural white resistance to Democratic efforts to quietly get rid of the Confederate battle flag as part of the state flag.

Lott has had his own moments of prominence in this shady tradition of sympathy for those who are nostalgic for the white supremacist South, ranging from the "segregation academies" that sprang up across his state after the public schools were integrated, to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a descendent of the infamous White Citizens' Councils that led the fight against civil rights across the South during the 1950s and 1960s.

The great southern political historian V.O. Key once referred to Lott's Mississippi and Thurmond's South Carolina as the "Super-South," the states where racial polarization and obsession with white supremacy had most deeply displaced every other political issue. "Old times there are not forgotten," in the words of the old southern battle hymn "Dixie." Thurmond's advanced age may have blurred his memories of the Lost Cause he championed. Lott has no such excuse. His words are not simply "offensive." They indicate a continuing difficulty in accepting that he, his state, and (at least in the South) his party were fundamentally, crucially, sinfully wrong on the most important political and moral issue of his lifetime.

It's up to Republicans to decide if this is the sort of "leader" they want to run the U.S. Senate. But if he loses his post, let's not hear any conservative whining about Lott being sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. The man just can't seem to repress his enthusiasm for one of the most shameful episodes in American history. As conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer has aptly said, that's not a matter of insensitivity, but of moral blindness.