The great South Carolina battle over the Confederate flag ended last week, not with a bang but — quite literally — a whimper. House Majority Leader Richard Quinn, the Republican who led the movement to remove the flag from the capitol dome where it has flown since 1962, actually burst into tears. “My vote was very difficult,” Quinn blubbered. “It was the hardest vote I ever cast.”

It may also be one of the last votes he ever casts. The last time a Republican leader tried to remove the Confederate flag was in 1994 when Gov. David Beasley betrayed a campaign pledge to leave the banner alone. Beasley was booted out of office in 1998, and today even he admits that his betrayal on the flag issue brought him down. Already flag defenders in South Carolina are measuring the throats of treacherous lawmakers and quietly sharpening their political knives.

What the legislators actually voted for was in fact a compromise. The flag will be removed, mainly because the Republican politicos are economic men who quivered over the impact of the state boycott the NAACP vowed to mount until the flag came down. But the flag will be relocated in a “place of honor” on the capitol grounds, flying from a pole on the Confederate Soldiers Monument there.

But just to prostrate themselves before the NAACP further, the Senate amended its own bill to lower the flag pole on the monument and illuminate it with dimmer lights so the flag would be less visible. Even the House rejected that proposal, merely the latest act of appeasement to the Afro-racist lobby that is now crowing about its power to dictate to the state. Not long before the vote on the flag, the same lawmakers also voted to adopt a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

But the Afro-racists are not so easily appeased. Only 3 of the 26 black legislators in the House voted for the compromise, and the NAACP not only refused to lift its boycott but actually threatened to expand and intensify it. “Why bring it down from the dome and wave it right in our faces?” demanded the NAACP’s state leader. “That’s an insult.” Just to rub in their contempt for the compromise and the weepy Republicans who passed it, black demonstrators burned Confederate and Nazi flags at the Confederate Soldiers Monument and then sprayed anti-white invectives all over the monument itself.

The NAACP at least has logic on its side. If there is nothing wrong with the Confederate flag, there was no reason to remove it from the place it has flown for four decades. If there is something wrong with it, why put it in a “place of honor” anywhere? No one except the Stupid Party is happy with the compromise, and even those who voted for it cry about it. The contempt of the NAACP — and of everyone else in the state — is precisely what the Republicans deserve. And contempt — as well as the perpetuation of the boycott — is exactly what they get for their foolish, unprincipled and fraudulent “compromise.” South Carolina voters, of whatever race, party or persuasion, have every good reason to slit a number of Republican throats in November.

As for the NAACP, if the “compromise” does nothing else, it exposes them for the racial extremists they are. The political reality is that few white lawmakers in South Carolina could vote to take down the flag without committing political suicide, which they may have done with the compromise alone. Moreover, the cultural reality is that the Confederacy, whatever its flaws or merits, really is an important part of the state’s heritage. Therefore, it is perfectly appropriate for the Confederate flag to be honored in some way.

But the NAACP and the extremists it leads won’t have it. Any celebration or mention of the state’s Confederate past is “an insult.” What they are demanding is the total extirpation of the Confederate heritage from the public memory. Even if you grant that flying the flag over the capitol dome was a bit much, there is no reason whatsoever to surrender to the complete erasure they want.

Yet, it remains to be seen what will happen. The Republicans now have every good reason to resist further demands from the racial extremists, but the fear, weakness and capacity for duplicity they have displayed over the last few years on the flag issue makes it unlikely they will. Probably the more likely result will be that the NAACP can recognize fear and weakness when it smells it and will continue to push its racist agenda until it gets everything it wants. And why shouldn’t it when all that rose from the ranks of the Stupid Party in South Carolina last week was the overpowering stench of cowardice?