Frank Rich is right on target with his New York Times column today, Bonfire of the Vanities:

"We shouldn't congratulate ourselves quite so fast. The Lott story didn't break this month -- it broke four years ago. Where was the press then? Where were the Democrats? "

He's right. Trent Lott took the fall but there are a host of other, even more powerful Republicans, that have "racial lapses" of their own....Ashcroft and Bush, to name a few.

"There are still too many Republican politicians who believe they can pander to whatever racist voters are out there without being called on it. When they are, they cringe — not so much because they care about losing their few black votes but because they care about losing soccer moms who are offended by race- baiting. "Elections are settled in the suburbs nowadays, 43 percent of the vote," said George Will in condemning Mr. Lott. It's that political reality, not any moral imperative, that mandated the majority leader's death sentence."

"President Bush is no bigot, and as he likes to remind us, some of his best employees are Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. He is in favor of something called "affirmative access" — which has led to a grand total of zero black Republican Congressmen in the next Congress. "Compassionate conservatism" seems less a program than a p.r. strategy to provide cover for the likes of a Lott or an Ashcroft."

"Asked this week what the administration has done for black Americans, Ari Fleischer used the kind of examples we heard from Mr. Lott. He said that "the president looks forward to going to Africa" (how patronizing can you be?) and wants "to double funding for historically black colleges and universities" (weren't the Republicans for color-blind policies rather than a politically correct form of de facto segregation?). Mr. Fleischer also said that the president sees education as "the next civil rights movement." If so, Mr. Bush is not that movement's courageous leader; in his education bill, he dumped the tiny school voucher provision that Republican polls say many black families want."

"Black voters are not fooled by such empty theatrics. For all the "diversity" at his convention and his rhetorical "compassion," Mr. Bush drew a third less of the black vote than his father and Bob Dole did. The White House's main concern now is that white voters be fooled. So Republicans are trying to create a moral equivalence between Democratic racial lapses and their own, hoping that Robert Byrd's long-renounced K.K.K. past and use of the word "nigger" will somehow blur their own recent record. Bill Frist is the ideal new Senate majority leader, because his own genuinely good works in Africa and "compassionate conservative" geniality will camouflage a voting pattern that, on any issue touching black Americans, is virtually the same as Mr. Lott's."