I’d be happy to give Trent Lott the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, there isn’t any.

As you’ve doubtless heard by now, the presumptive Senate majority leader stuck his foot in it last week at a party for Sen. Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday. Referring to Thurmond’s 1948 bid for the presidency, the Mississippi senator declared:

“I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.”

But Thurmond ran on a platform of racial segregation, declaring that “all the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches.” So one has to wonder: What are these “problems” Lott refers to that would have been avoided by his colleague’s election? Does he mean the Montgomery bus boycott? The Freedom Rides? The Civil Rights Act?

Lott would have us believe it’s none of the above. He has issued two apologies, including a statement on Monday in which he acknowledged “a poor choice of words.”

The thing is Lott has made this “poor choice” before. The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., reports on a 1980 rally for candidate Ronald Reagan at which Thurmond spoke in support of state’s rights, a coded expression denoting opposition to civil-rights legislation. Lott then told the audience: “If we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today.”

Consider, too, the 1998 revelation of Lott’s long affiliation with the so-called Council of Conservative Citizens. The council disputes characterizations that call it a hate group. On the other hand, a writer on its Web site once described the children of interracial marriage as “a slimy brown glop,” and one of its officials advocated sending all non-Europeans back to their ancestral homes. Sure sounds like a hate group to me.

All of which strongly suggests that Lott didn’t so much engage in “a poor choice of words” as accidentally speak his mind.

Not that he’s without defenders. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., has pronounced himself satisfied that Lott is no proponent of racial segregation. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Oklahoma’s J.C. Watts, the only black Republican in the House of Representatives, have likewise stood up for Lott.

With all due respect to Specter and McCain, however, I must admit that I’m usually less than bowled over when white guys vouch that other white guys are not racists. And J.C. Watts would have more credibility had he not allowed himself to be trotted out like a show pony to promote his party’s alleged diversity. Indeed, that was key to the 1995 “GOP Minority Outreach Strategy,” a grand name for what was in essence a memo that called for positioning Watts and other black Republicans prominently at news conferences.

And the GOP wonders why it has been unable to capture black votes, why even conservative blacks shy away. It is not, despite the suspicions of Republican partisans, that blacks believe that Democrats have been so stunningly visionary. It is, rather, that they feel that Republicans have been so stunningly inept.

From Bob Dole’s snubbing an NAACP convention because he preferred audiences “I can relate to” to Jeb Bush’s being asked what he might offer black voters and responding, “Probably nothing,” the GOP has rarely missed a chance to bobble the ball where race is concerned.

But Lott’s transgression is of a different magnitude.

The best interpretation of his “poor choice of words” suggests an ignorance incurable by reasoning. The worst suggests a white hood somewhere in the back of his closet. Either way, the man is an embarrassment to decent, thinking and enlightened people. If the GOP is serious about a “minority outreach strategy,” it will remove him from its leadership.

That is, of course, a mighty big if.