As our nation's pundits continue to debate whether new President-elect Donald Trump is himself a racist or merely has had an uncanny lifelong ability to surround himself with racists, let's look back at the man he believes ought to be in charge of enforcing the nation's laws. Here's Sen. Jeff Sessions last year, taking a contrarian opinion as the great majority of his fellow lawmakers finally decided, in the wake of the Charleston murders, that it was time to retire that damn confederate flag.

Sessions said he was no fan of any attempt to “erase history” or “who we are,” recalling his own family’s role in the Civil War. “This is a huge part of who we are and the left is continually seeking, in a host of different ways, it seems to me, I don’t want to be too paranoid about this, but they seek to delegitimize the fabulous accomplishments of our country,” the senator added.

Sessions left unspoken what the “fabulous accomplishments” represented by the confederate flag might have been.

Of course we are not erasing the confederate flag from the history museums (though you may not find it in Civil War museums because it ain't the real "confederate flag"). We are erasing it from atop our state legislatures, because as the banner of the anti-civil rights movement it has long represented not "fabulous accomplishments," but unfettered racism.

Jeff Sessions knows this. And the reason he is in the Senate today and not a federal judge is because his fellow Republican senators found Session's dabbling in racism, in the old enlightened days of the Reagan administration, too odious to ignore.