When the Rainbow Is Enough (with Update)

An editorial in the Sunday New York Times begins:

"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 peculiar (and some would say, nothing new for the rabid right) but not inexplicable.  It is peculiarly extreme politically, as an attempt to pre-demonize the 2016 Democratic candidates and poison the electorate.  If Republicans can create the fantasy of a failed Obama presidency and color the mood of the media and the country particularly in the summer before the election,  they might have a chance--and perhaps their only chance--of winning.  By either associating candidates with an unpopular President, or creating enough panic (not hard to do among Dems unfortunately) so they run away from the Obama legacy (as many did in 2014) they hope to replicate the outcomes of 2014.

So they need to keep hammering at Obamacare before its success becomes generally accepted, and they need to undermine a deal with Iran that could not only forestall very deadly warfare there, but could go a long way to establishing peaceful change in the region.  These ends for the good of the country, for the lives that might be otherwise wasted and lost, for the good of the world--they are nothing compared to political party advantage--because this is a holy war, a last desperate gasp war, and in more ways that one, a race war.

I like passing along the funny spin that Borowitz etc. put on things, but unfortunately they exaggerate very little.  The party of Cheney really does want war with Iran, among others.  The Republican party really is deeply beholden to racism, and to apocalyptic fundamentalism.  The fact that they use outrageously extreme rhetoric to describe their political enemies--even when those enemies are pursuing policies that Republicans only recently abandoned--cannot confuse the issue: they are extremists, and getting more extreme all the time.

The 2016 campaign that essentially starts today promises to be the ugliest of my lifetime, and I've lived through some ugly ones.  I plan to ignore it as much as possible.  I fully expect it to be beneath contempt.  But though I turn my attention to where it might do more good, I'm not for a moment fooled as to the suicidal reign of hatred and ignorance that is embodied by a willing Republican Party.  I don't need wasted hours of angst for more than a year to know how I will vote.

Update: The last paragraph of Jonathan Chiat's column concluding that there is only one choice for President in 2016: "The argument for Clinton in 2016 is that she is the candidate of the only major American political party not run by lunatics. There is only one choice for voters who want a president who accepts climate science and rejects voodoo economics, and whose domestic platform would not engineer the largest upward redistribution of resources in American history. Even if the relatively sober Jeb Bush wins the nomination, he will have to accommodate himself to his party's barking-mad consensus. She is non-crazy America’s choice by default. And it is not necessarily an exciting choice, but it is an easy one, and a proposition behind which she will probably command a majority."

The hope for a different, better politics in Washington was not fulfilled.  Hope may best be directed elsewhere. Different hopes, some smaller, some larger, that inform what we do.  For hope is enacted in the present.  There are arcs of history still to bend, and rainbows still to follow.