Speaking of hubris...

It's as if they've learned nothing:

If it's true that Lott has won his race, I think it's just another sign of how Republicans often fail to take politics seriously enough. I gather lots of folks in the Senate feel that Lott was treated unfairly when he lost his majority leader job and so giving him the whip post is something of a just consolation or some such. I'm sure some people think he'd be a good whip. But, ultimately, who cares? The GOP has an image problem right now. What's fair or unfair to Lott is of microscopic importance. Does the GOP really need a pork-loving Senator best known to average Americans — fairly or unfairly — as nostalgic for segregation?

So they want to keep the same defeated leadership team in the House, and in the Senate, Lott is back on the job? Idiots. There's no other word for it.

Update: MKH - "You Guys Are Killin' Me." E.M.: "We get vaguely racist ... kind of aloof, and incompetent, all over again.." Cap'n My Cap'n (ex ante): "If the Senate Republicans want us to take them seriously, then they need to send Trent Lott to the back bench where he belongs." Michelle (who also rounds up more reaction): "along come Beltway Republicans to remind us of how lame the GOP leadership is.".

Even if you think Lott was unfairly treated, politics ain't beanbag, and appearances matter. And if you do think Lott was unfairly treated, let's briefly remind ourselves of why he was ejected in the first place. Contra CNN, Lott was not "ousted from the top Senate Republican leadership job four years ago" for anything as innocuous as "remarks considered racially insensitive" (emphasis added), he was ousted for this:

"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." If you're "proud" that your state voted for a party whose slogan was "Segregation Forever!" (the sole difference between the Democrats and the Dixiecrats being the latter's "oppos[ition] [to] racial integration and [desire] to retain Jim Crow laws and racial segregation," they having left the Democratic party "[a]fter President Truman's endorsement of the civil rights plank") I would question whether you belong in the United States Senate, let alone in the leadership of the Republican Party.

Lott apologized for his comments at the time, but to my knowledge, while he has explained that "[a] poor choice of words conveyed to some the impression that I embraced the discarded policies of the past," ("discarded"!), he has yet to explain what impression he meant to convey. I decry this decision by the caucus in the strongest possible terms.