There is nothing, nothing, in politics more infuriating than the Democrats’ relentless use of racial division to cement the kind of thinking Courtland Milloy illustrated in his latest Washington Post column. The ever-expanding list of things that are considered racist to criticize so long as Obama is president is perhaps the most absurd manifestation of this line of thinking. Nearly all of these fail “the John Edwards test” for things Republicans would quite reasonably have been expected to say if Edwards rather than Obama had been the next Democratic nominee and president. But even in that context, Martin Bashir of MSNBC has reached a new low.

Via the National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke, we have Bashir claiming that “IRS” is the new “n-word”: “the IRS. Three letters that sound so innocent. But we know what you mean”:

I wish I was making this up. You really cannot satirize the desire of Obama’s defenders to deploy his race as a sword and shield to override even discussion of how the federal government uses its power over ordinary citizens. The entire purpose of this relentless drumbeat is to create an environment in which rational discourse and debate is impossible.

Voters who vote on the basis of race are – as you can see from Milloy’s column – not voting on the basis of the actual policy decisions, competence and integrity of the people they vote for, and indeed may end up making every possible excuse to avoid holding those people accountable. It’s deeply corrosive to democracy to approach politics this way – it invariably leads to a corrupt, incompetent one-party government, secure in the knowledge that it can play its trump card to keep the voters at bay and avoid political competition. (Indeed, the Democrats’ use of race in the Jim Crow South held back for years the movement of many white Southerners to their more natural home in the GOP, and the use of ethnic and racial wedges has been a staple of corrupt urban machine politics for centuries).

Racial politics are the true last refuge of the scoundrel. We should be unsurprised to see ever more of them, the more Obama’s Administration struggles under the weight of its scandals.