Last week I wrote that by today I expected Trent Lott to be gone. As of this writing he is still clinging to the Senate majority leadership, which means either I was wrong, or he just has stronger fingernails than I gave him credit for having.

I think it's the latter, and surely by now his cuticles must be cracking. Certainly he's got all the other Senate Republicans gnawing theirs down to the quicks.

When Sen. Lott fondly reminisced about the good old days of the segregationist Dixiecrats at Strom Thurmond's birthday party two weeks ago, he spoke the epitaph of his career as a Senate leader. Unfortunately for the rest of the Republican Party, he is as tone deaf to the reaction he has caused as he was to the meaning of what he said in praise of Sen. Thurmond.

He is acting like the guy at the Christmas party who has had too much to drink but doesn't know it. His friends are standing around whispering that somebody ought to cut him off and take him home, but nobody wants to step up and wrestle the car keys away from him.

Behind the scenes in Washington, the Republican Senators are drawing lots (no pun intended) to see who will do the deed. The likely candidate will be someone like Phil Graham of Texas, who is retiring anyway and won't have to bear the consequences. Senators who will still be around next year don't want the task of telling Sen. Lott to his face that he should step aside because if he doesn't, and somehow manages to survive a Jan. 6 caucus vote for the leadership post, he just might remember who the disloyal messenger was.

But here's my prediction. Somebody will get the short straw and be dispatched to dispatch the senator, if they have't already. It might be Phil Graham. It might be some White House functionary who will tell him President Bush really wants him gone, but it will be somebody. The last thing any of the senators want, even the ones who don't really think he deserves to lose his job over what he said, is to have to stand up and vote to support him on Jan. 6. What they want is to be able to choose somebody else without having to vote against Sen. Lott to do it.

By hanging on, Sen. Lott is the Grinch stealing his colleagues' Christmas. Right now Senate Republicans are thinking about how insincere they will sound when they tell their constituents that, yes, they deplored Sen. Lott's paean to the politics of segregation, but they didn't deplore it enough to do anything about it. They're thinking about that while watching news clips of Sen. Lott on BET, and they are wondering how many times they will have to explain away their actions if they support this guy.

Technically, Sen. Lott only needs 26 votes to retain his position. But in reality, he, and the party, can't afford a vote that is anywhere near that close. What does it say about the Republican leadership if the vote comes down to 26/25, or even 36/15? That kind of a split will leave scars and make a mockery of the solidarity the party has been so proudly touting since cleaning up in the mid-term elections.

There are some people who have been complaining about the treatment Sen. Lott has been getting during the past two weeks. They say that if his enemies want to punish him for a few poorly chosen remarks that reflect the evil thoughts of his youth, they should also vilify people like Bill Clinton as a lying philanderer and Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., for being a former member of the Ku Klux Klan.

OK, vilify away if it makes you feel better. But revisiting those tired old sins won't change a syllable of what Trent Lott said. It won't change the fact that all the apologies in the world won't wash the words out of his mouth. Words are like bullets - you can't take them back. Trent Lott shot off his mouth without thinking, but the impact of what he said has caused a lot of other people to wonder about what sort of ammunition he uses to load his brain.

I'll revise my prediction of last week. He'll be gone by New Year's Day. The Republicans can't afford to keep him.

Contact David Wells at 768-8310; fax: 768-8610; e-mail:dwells@enquirer.com.