How do you turn your normal Republican leader into a racist in three easy stages? Let’s see: On Aug. 19, Reihan Salam writes a post saying that conservatives are “overwhelmingly white” in a country much less so, that some feel that immigrants from Bangladesh or from Mexico may not share their values, and that these voters, most over 50, “are looking for champions … people who are unafraid to fight for the America they remember” because they have “a sense that the country they grew up in is fading away.”

This is seen by Matthew Yglesias at Think Progress and linked to a statement made by House Speaker John Boehner over a year ago that, under the Democrats, the country he grew up in was being “snuffed out.”