ROY EDROSO

The exuberantly cruel headline of the December 13 New York Post op-ed, "The Internet's First Scalp," was followed by this historicizing statement: "There's nothing more exciting that watching a new medium mature before your eyes," gushed author John Podhoretz, who seems a bit young to remember the Golden Age of Radio or any other relevant point of comparison.

Podhoretz was talking about the saturation bombing (or, to avail the blogosphere's preferred usage, "flooding the zone") visited upon Trent Lott--whose offenses need not be described here, as they are by now known to every man, woman, and child in the Free World--and the internet's role in disseminating those depredations, and instructing us on how to think about and act upon them.

Writing shortly before Lott's third apology, Podhoretz attributed Lott's "downfall," such as it had been, to the brave souls of the web who had "gone ballistic" on the Mississippi senator, with special plaudits for those conservative bloggers who "didn't circle the wagons, claiming that Lott was being mistreated and he'd already apologized and Bill Clinton did worse. Rather, they turned their wagons outward and commenced firing at Lott..."

This is a heroic rendering of the event--traitor and eagle working together to scourge this Jim-Crow-come-lately from the pinnacle of the upper chamber. Let us now compare it to actual events, starting with a little prehistory for our younger readers:

After the Second World War, the Democratic Party reached out to the nascent civil rights movement, causing many Southern Democrats to rebel. One such was Strom Thurmond, who ran for president on an explicitly racist platform in 1948. In the years to come Republicans, moribund in Dixie since Reconstruction (despite their nearly total abandonment of Southern blacks), would make the most of this opportunity, signing up former Dixiecrats such as Thurmond and John Connally, and youngsters such as Lott, who would not scruple to invoke the glorious days before Brown v. Board of Education in pursuit of white votes; and this "Southern Strategy" served the GOP well lo these many years.

Movement conservatives were very much on board, as shown by this too-little-known summary from a white-power web site. The racial commentary of conservative flagship National Review, from its 1957 editorial "Why the South Must Prevail" ("It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists...") through its mournful observance of the tenth anniversary of Brown ("the ludicrously named 'civil rights movement'...what a price we are paying for Brown!") and beyond, was exceedingly clear in meaning and intention.

As egregious racism gradually became less fashionable, Republicans--and the conservatives who were taking that Party over--transmitted their racial messages in less blatant ways. Long before he made his pilgrimage to Bitburg, for example, Ronald Reagan gave a "state's rights" speech in the small Mississippi town where three civil rights workers had been murdered. "Willie Horton" came to mean "crazy black people Democrats will unleash on your daughter." And so on.

By 2002, their tone had grown milder still; even the National Review was celebrating MLK Day ("King's message is profoundly conservative"), and boasting several black writers of its own. Of course, their white writers still had fun with black people--none more so than Jonah Goldberg, whose racial badinage has run the gamut from puckish ("so depressing that 'people of color' has replaced 'colored people.' In a very important sense, the old phrase was better...") to schmuckish ("I used words like 'monkey' and 'simian' in association with the students...I did not know or realize that [Florida A&M] was a traditionally black college").

Shortly after Lott's historic remarks, liberal bloggers Atrios and Joshua Marshall raised an alarm, provoking a great series of posts from web conservatives who, to be fair about it, seemed sincerely disgusted with the senator's statement. They called on Lott to expand on his first, churlish apology. "I for one do not believe Trent Lott is a racist or a segregationist," said David Frum, "So Lott needs to make it clear that he does not in fact think [that segregation was a good thing]." "Lott should strongly declare how he has been misinterpreted," seconded Justin Katz, among myriad others.

At this harmonious moment, perhaps something like the triumph described by Podhoretz was expected. "Think he'll last through the weekend?" smirked InstaPundit of Lott on December 12.

As it happened, Lott did. He apologized again, and again, and again. Nobody went for it, of course, but he persisted, and the drumbeat of denunciation went on--but not all of it, and eventually not even most of it, was particularly against Lott.

Trial balloons were floated, bearing the idea that liberals were insufficiently outraged by Lott's remarks, based partly on Tom Daschle's mild, collegial reaction, and, perhaps, on faith that the Right's zone-flooding strategy would, by sheer force of volume, render outside opinion irrelevant. "Either the Democratic Party is appallingly inept, by dropping the ball on this issue, or it's appallingly cynical...I guess 'inept' wins either way," mused InstaPundit. "Where's the New York Times?" cried Andrew Sullivan. "Howell Raines is so intent on finding Bull Connor in a tony golf club that when Bull Connor emerges as the soul of the Republican Senate Majority Leader, he doesn't notice it."

Word was also spread that Lott was never a friend to the Right at all: He was a weak and inefficient Senate majority leader who had effectively given the hated Clinton a pass in his impeachment trial. "He is only for the status quo," wrote Arthur Silber, "stunningly lackluster and uninspiring...tin ear and vacuous mind" In fact, after the GOP's victory in 2002, Capitol Hill Blue reported, "a Republican consultant I know threw up his hands in disgust" (pause to digest this counterintuitive image) "and said 'Christ, this means we'll have Trent Lott as the leader again.'" One wondered how Lott got the job in the first place--till Robert George told us (via another blind Republican quote), "Trent Lott survives because the ex-frat boy puts on a good kegger."

As always happens when conservatives are in high dudgeon, comparisons to Clinton were hauled out. Quoth National Review's Rod Dreher, "Ol' Trent is just following the example of his fellow Baby-Boomer Son of the South, William Jefferson Clinton." A parody at Transterrestrial Musings had Lott, in his BET appearance, announcing that, as "Bill Clinton was the first black president," he was "the first black Senate Majority Leader." Get it?

Meanwhile, in a manner dismayingly familiar from the last election, prominent liberal outlets attempted to play nice with their new conservative friends. The American Prospect's TAPPED weblog felt obliged to state that opposition to affirmative action was not racist. ("You want divisive racial politics?" TAPPED added. "Just wait until the Rev. Al Sharpton makes a formal announcement that he's a Democratic presidential contender.") The New Republic's weblog hit Mississippi Democrat Jim Thompson's suggestion that Lott back up his apologies with "a minimum wage increase, expanded affordable housing and a prescription drug benefit," commenting with no little disgust that "Thompson should demand that Lott resign and leave the two-bit shakedown tactics to Jesse Jackson." Armed Liberal even praised Strom Thurmond ("first Southern senator to hire a black staff aide...In the 1980s, he voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act").

How did their counterparts on the Right respond to these gracious gestures? "The way some far-left Democrats use race is no less repulsive than the way some far-right Republicans do," said Andrew Sullivan. "None of my criticism of Lott should therefore be read as in any way an endorsement of the Democratic alternative." Mona Charen decried the "thousands of ways" in which "Democrats seek to tar Republicans as racists." Dreher: "There are lots of liberals who are convinced that every conservative is dying to put on a white sheet and re-enact Jim Crow, It's a lie and a slander..." Goldberg: "Opportunism by racial activists doesn't change what Lott said, but what Lott said doesn't justify the opportunism."

And so the liberals had mutated, in the conservative imagination, from comrades-in-arms to Lott's patsies to feckless mau-maus--engineers of "an effort to tarnish all Republicans and all the people in the South (even the Northeast liberals who've relocated down there) as racist, hick good ol' Duke boys, singing Sweet Home Alabama and drinking PBR with their friends in low places," per Rush Limbaugh.

The souring of their outlook is easily explained. For all the kilobauds expended, the internet scalp hunters could only smoke Lott out. His own colleagues and rivals, not the blogosphere, would ultimately wield the tomahawk. And it would also seem that the association of modern Southern Republicans with racism is stronger, and more intuitively understood by voters, than even the timely postings of a thousand semi-pro pundits can counteract.

Their advocacy now enters a bizarre phase. At National Review Online, John Derbyshire posts a list of provocative pro-Lott remarks he allegedly received from readers. Here is a passage: "We had to swallow Affirmative Action, MLK day, Rodney King, O.J. Simpson, and all the posturing, hypocrisy, and fake anger about 'racial profiling.' Still it goes on, and we are still supposed to be cringing, apologizing, beating our breasts and moaning: 'Guilty! Guilty! We are all guilty!' Black politicians can say anything they like about us--the most hateful, ignorant things--and nobody turns a hair..."

Understand, these are from readers, Derbyshire explains: "I don't say you have to like it..."

At this writing, Lott still wanders the political desert, waiting upon an expected defenestration by his Republican colleagues. It must be awful for him. But perhaps he takes some comfort from the fact that those who first focused their rage on him are now turning it on each other.

The zone is flooded, all right. And all who stand in it can feel its filthy waters rise.