The news of Senator Lott’s decision to retire from the Senate was met yesterday with fulsome praise from the leader of the Democrats in the upper chamber. “Senator Lott has been a true friend, consistently reaching across the aisle to serve the interests of the people of Mississippi and to help me serve the interests of the people of Nevada,” Senator Reid said. Mr. Reid called Mr. Lott “one of the most pleasant Senators I have ever worked with” and said, “I am proud to have worked side-by-side with such a distinguished public servant as Trent Lott, and I wish him well as he leaves the Senate.”

It would be too much to call Mr. Reid “Lott’s Wife,” but his remarks are just more evidence of what a sorry senator Mr. Lott has been. We noted some of the history in our December 12, 2002, editorial, “Lott and Jefferson Davis,” written when Mr. Lott had to apologize and, eventually, step down as Republican leader after a comment at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party that if Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist presidential bid had succeeded, America “wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years.”

In the that editorial, issued in 2002, we noted that in a interview issued in 1984 by the Southern Partisan magazine, Mr. Lott observed, “I think a lot of the fundamental principles that Jefferson Davis believed in are very important today to people all across the country, and they apply to the Republican Party. … More and more of Jefferson Davis’ descendants, direct or indirect, are becoming involved in the Republican Party.” What Mr. Lott was doing even granting an interview to Southern Partisan at the time is beyond us: An article in the magazine that same year proclaimed “Negroes, Asians, and Orientals (is Japan the exception?); Hispanics, Latins, and Eastern Europeans; have no temperament for democracy, never had, and probably never will.”

All of that was reported by Ira Stoll, now managing editor of The New York Sun, on page one of the Jewish Forward newspaper on October 13, 1995. These columns noted in the 2002 editorial that “The Republicans, after all, are the party of Lincoln, not Davis, and the party has an intellectual tradition that has nothing in common with what Mr. Lott blathered on about in the Southern Partisan.” That is a tradition this newspaper has tried to uphold.

Mr. Lott’s failings go way beyond racist remarks and his bizarre misunderstanding of Civil War history. The former college cheerleader has been such a proponent of wasteful government spending that he earned a spot in Citizens Against Government Waste’s “Porker of the Month” Hall of Shame for a 2006 effort to spend $700 million in taxpayer funds on building a “railroad to nowhere” in his home state of Mississippi. Mr. Lott personally killed a proposal for a Congressional database that would have increased the transparency of pork-barrel spending.

Earlier this month, Mr. Lott voted with Senator Reid to override President Bush’s veto of a $23 billion water projects spending bill. National Public Radio quoted the Mississippian as saying, “What Bush sees as pork-barrel items ‘are good, deserved, justified projects.'” That kind of disregard for the leadership of his party — and Mr. Bush was elected in part on his commitment to budgetary reform — is no doubt one reason why Republicans lost their mandate to lead the Senate.

There has been a good bit of punditry of late in respect of President Reagan’s visit, during the 1980 campaign, to Mississippi, where he spoke of his belief in state’s rights. The left has tried to portray that as evidence that the Great Communicator was, if not a racist himself, prepared to use racist code-words to court the southern vote. That notion has been debunked by newspapermen and bloggers alike. But what is one to make to the farewell embrace of Mr. Lott by the likes of Mr. Reid?

It’s something to watch in the coming year — and beyond, for Mr. Lott is leaving the Senate in a display of self-serving avarice that is astonishing even for Washington. The Washington Post reported yesterday that by leaving before the end of this year, the Mississippian will avoid a new restriction that “bars lawmakers from taking lobbying jobs for two years after they leave public service.” Though Mr. Lott denied that is his motivation, his timing will maximize his ability to cash in quickly in the private sector on his close ties with politicians like the Democratic leader, Mr. Reid. Stay tuned.