Once the press latches onto someone with much to explain away, if not hide, you might as well forget it. It's kind of like the government: slow to act, hard to get focused, letting much slip through the cracks (look at the conviction rates for violent crime - you will probably get away with it, at least the first few times), look how much the IRS doesn't collect each year.

BUT, once the government latches on to you, forget it, it will hold on with the tenacity of a snapping turtle. Same with the press: once they start sniffing around, they are going to find something, and in the case of unreconstructed Confederate bigot Trent Lott, there is plenty to find. The tool doesn't even bother to speak in the coded language of racism, he just blurts it out as if Bull Connor were still Commissioner of Public Safety for Birmingham.

AP has more today:

Senate Republican leader Trent Lott tried to help Bob Jones University keep its federal tax-exempt status despite the school's policy prohibiting interracial dating two decades before his recent comments stirred a race controversy.

"Racial discrimination does not always violate public policy," Lott, then a congressman from Mississippi, wrote in a 1981 friend of the court brief that unsuccessfully urged the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the Internal Revenue Service from stripping the university's tax exemption.

Meanwhile Lott is still stomping on the fire that threatens to engulf him:

Making the rounds on television news shows, Lott said Wednesday his comments were a "mistake of the head and not of the heart" and added "the words were terrible and I regret that."

No Republican senators have called for his ouster, but:

the four Republican appointees to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a joint statement deploring Lott's comments as a "particularly shameful remark coming from a leader of the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, and the party that supported all of these essential steps forward far more vigorously than did the Democratic Party, which at the time was the home of Congressional southerners committed to white supremacy."