Of course a day like today — replete with the incoming details of administrative scandals fraught with authoritative overreach and corruption — could, for this guy, only end with one possible explanation for all of the complaints about President Obama’s governing prowess. When in doubt, revert to that ol’ progressive standby: Racism and white supremacy, obviously.

The problem is there are people in this country, maybe ten percent, I don’t know what the number, maybe twenty percent on a bad day, who want this president to have an asterisk next to his name in the history books, that he really wasn’t president. … They want to be able to say, well, he didn’t really have that batting average; he really wasn’t the first African American president; he really didn’t do health care; he really didn’t kill bin Laden. There’s an asterisk, and they have been fighting for that, the people like Donald Trump, since day one. They can’t stand the idea that he’s president, and a piece of it is racism. Not that somebody in one racial group doesn’t like somebody in another racial group, so what? It’s the sense that the white race must rule, that’s what racism is, and they can’t stand the idea that a man who’s not white is president. That is real, that sense of racial superiority and rule is in the hearts of some people in this country. Not all conservatives, not even all right-wingers, but it always comes through with this birther crap and these other references and somehow trying to erase ObamaCare, erase his record in history, and a big part of it is bought into by people like John Boehner, who’s not a bad guy, but he knows the only way he can talk to the hard right is talk their language.

Well, that devolved quickly. Firstly, I would merely point out that, no actually, racism isn’t merely white supremacists’ attitude toward everybody else, and that no category of racism is deserving of a “So what?” dismissal. But, more importantly… what the what? From where is he pulling this ‘ten-to-twenty percent of Americans are white supremacists’ number, and then extrapolating from that the fact that this racist fraction of the American population is somehow the ruling voice of and force behind the entire conservative movement? I’m pretty sure that the mass opposition to the government commandeering of the entire health-care industry stems from fiscal and economic concerns about — you know — the government commandeering of the entire health-care industry, rather than from the white supremacy curdling inside of these conservatives’ hateful hearts. To hear this guy tell it, you’d think that everybody really, really wanted universal healthcare, but they just can’t stand that a black man should get the credit for the legislation, or something. Yes, as Chris Matthews says, all of these instances of bureaucratic abuse do indeed help make the conservative case for small government — and his rejoinder is that they really just can’t get over their racism? …Good one.