While I think we agree on your conclusion (Senate Rs revoting on their leadership), you need to consider the following as well:
You wrote: "Was Butz a racist? Probably not. There's no outstanding evidence to say that he or his policies even once sought to deny blacks due process or equal rights under the law."
I don't think it's helpful for whites to participate in the dumbing down of the definition of 'racism' in that way. Your definition would permit every minority group, which insists that it doesn't by itself have the power to deny whites "due process or equal rights under the law", to speak and act toward white Americans with hostility.
If you put any significance at all on racial characteristics in discussing other human beings, except to physically identify someone, you're likely being racist. Help me with some examples of how this might not be so. Even physically, the definition of 'black' is almost meaningless--so Jimmy the Greek-type references are racist. Culturally, 'black' people are increasingly less monolithic.
Limbaugh and Buchanan's pathetic distinction between sympathy and policy misses the point: separate is unequal--being 'ok on black issues' doesn't compensate for the habit of distinguishing between people on the basis of race.
I'll grant you that the term is somewhat hard to pin down, much like obscenity. I've often wondered why Don Rickles wasn't viewed as a racist and why blacks can use the n-word in all types of manner and yet recoil in horror to hear a white person say it.
If it simply means pointing out the differences between cultural groups then almost everyone is a racist. Look at all the comments going on about Arabs since 9-11. A lot of that is blatantly racist but it's not framed as such.
So I personally go less by a person's words as by their actions. Do they lash out in violence against a particular racial or ethnic group? Do they refuse equal access or opportunities to certain racial or ethnic groups or support those who do? Those are the ones I personally consider racists.
I've always felt Archie Bunker wasn't a racist as much as he was ignorant. He was a reflection of the society he grew up in and believed all the stereotyping he'd been told about various ethnic and racial groups. And yet he tolerated folks from other races in his home and at his workplace. He just never understood that the stereotyping wasn't true. In fact, I think he'd have fit right in with today's Democrats in that he viewed everyone by their group identities and not by their individual qualities.
It's very difficult to assess either Lott or Butz from such a distance, not knowing how they are in private conversations. But I don't think either is a racist although some things in Lott's background make me wonder if he once was.