Lott Countdown: Pick Your Pool Number
 The Washington Post's account today of Don Nickles's announced challenge to Lott is a classic example of how Washington players resort to leaks when somebody dense -- in this case, Lott -- isn't getting the message. Reporters VandeHei and Dewar hardly bother to disguise the White House fingerprints on their copy. The leak asserting that the Administration's African-American superstars Powell and Rice refused Lott's requests for statements of support is devastating new information that will doubtless budge some Senatorial fence-sitters. One needn't be the Cumean Sybil to divine that Bush wants Lott outta there, and fast.
The Nickles development today is in addition to the revealing bio piece in the New York Times, an editorial in the conservative New York Post calling for Lott to quit, and cover stories in the new issues of Time and Newsweek. In short, Lott's press conference Friday did, at best, nothing to help him. The canonical trio of conservative bloggers I follow -- Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds, and Mickey Kaus -- judged Lott's performance Friday as I did: smug, insincere, dismissive, and evasive. Their fury mounts each day Lott egotistically clings to his post. And God only knows what's going on in the perfervid basements of Talk Radio Land.
However, one conservative blogger I know personally -- Hugh Hewitt in California -- made some bafflingly supportive remarks about Lott on Tuesday:
Trent Lott apologized for his foot-in-mouth performance at Strom Thurmond's farewell party. The story won't be gone for a few days more, however, because Democrats foolishly overreacted, and once again underestimated the common sense of the American people. I'll write about this tomorrow in my WorldNetDaily column, but the over-the-top attempts by Al Gore and Jesse Jackson to turn Lott into a Dixiecrat also remind us that Bill Clinton lied again last week when he told a Democratic leadership group that the Dems lacked a "destruction machine." They have a destruction machine -- it just isn't very good when Bill and James Carville aren't in control of it.
It's a sure sign of desperate thinking when a conservative must resort to the Clinton bogeyman to change the subject. What the heck can Hewitt mean by the "common sense of the American people"? That the American people will condone Lott's lifelong courting of the segregationist vote? That they care not that the Republican party provides safe harbor for all manner of Southern racists? That they are pleased that in the next Congress there will be not ONE single African-American Republican? As the week progressed Hewitt turned hawkish on Lott, but he clearly was following, not leading, and the blog hasn't bothered to explain why he changed his mind.
I'm a little surprised that no polling results about Lott have yet been made public, inasmuch as I'm certain that both parties are polling frantically. If the American people are, as Hewitt hoped, regarding L'affaire Lott with a great big yawn, then Lott could still tough it out, unlikely as that seems today. If, however, the American people are truly that indifferent then we've got bigger problems in this country.
By the way, has anybody noticed that the name "Trent Lott" has the same ring as those artificial, vaguely suggestive pseudonyms belonging to the actors in porn movies?
11:20:38 PM 
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