Last Call For Yes, It's About Race

The NY Times editorial board drops a brutal piece on the GOP's effort to try to bury President Obama's legacy under racist demonization.

It is a peculiar, but unmistakable, phenomenon: As Barack Obama’s presidency heads into its twilight, the rage of the Republican establishment toward him is growing louder, angrier and more destructive.

Republican lawmakers in Washington and around the country have been focused on blocking Mr. Obama’s agenda and denigrating him personally since the day he took office in 2009. But even against that backdrop, and even by the dismal standards of political discourse today, the tone of the current attacks is disturbing. So is their evident intent — to undermine not just Mr. Obama’s policies, but his very legitimacy as president.

It is a line of attack that echoes Republicans’ earlier questioning of Mr. Obama’s American citizenship. Those attacks were blatantly racist in their message — reminding people that Mr. Obama was black, suggesting he was African, and planting the equally false idea that he was secretly Muslim. The current offensive is slightly more subtle, but it is impossible to dismiss the notion that race plays a role in it.

And Republicans, those bastions of liberty and freedom, will certainly call for the destruction of the NY Times and the arrest or worse of its editorial board.

But it's about damned time that somebody with a press megaphone called Republicans out for their actions in 2015.  The country needs to be constantly reminded of this. And until voters choose to punish the GOP for this behavior, they will keep doing it with every Democrat they can find.