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The Baltimore Sun editorial of this morning nails it:

Southern Strategy

... [T]he Pickering nomination was turned into a symbol. And however much subsequent investigation shows him to be kind to pets and small children, it's still a symbol. It's a symbol of the Bush administration's determination to push for everything it can get, to cram its agenda down its critics' throats. Judge Pickering was the worst of the president's nominations last year, and it was surely no accident that his name showed up on one of the very first messages to the new Congress.

And it symbolizes something else -- that just in case anyone down in Dixie feared the White House was going soft after this Lott business, now there can be no doubts. We're not even talking winks and nods here -- it's more like a billboard.

Gotta wonder if the otherwise clueless Jack White reads the Sun editorial page. He should. Otherwise, he might refrain from penning such utterly foolish lines as this:

Even better, on the theory that confession is the first step to redemption, Bush could deliver a speech acknowledging the G.O.P.'s addiction to race-baiting politics and making it clear that such tactics will no longer be tolerated.

Sure, Jack. Bush could deliver a speech like that. And primates might soar from his posterior region too.

Of course, I saw Niger Innis on MSNBC during the Lott furor, declaiming that perhaps now Mr. Lott could become a great national spokesman for racial tolerance.

As it turns out, he's actually become a spokesman for Insincere Apologists Anonymous.

Coming up: How the GOP is addicted to pandering to right-wing extremists of all stripes.