WASHINGTON –

Since Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, a recurring theme of our political discourse has been how crazy Republicans appear to have become. Birthers, death panels, shariah law, legitimate rape: The heretofore successfully repressed tendencies of the Reagan coalition blossomed like a noxious flower and have become a leitmotif of politics during the past four years. It is why I left government and am now a political independent.

There is good reason why I did not become a Democrat. To be sure, Democrats at least attempt to govern and solve problems, whereas the GOP's reflexive obstruction and ideological rigidity lead the country nowhere. But more than four years of all-out ideological warfare have taken their toll on the Democrats as well, leaving our governmental system floundering for practical solutions. The Obama administration inadvertently hammered home this sad truth when it announced Feb. 26 that it would begin releasing illegal immigrants from detention, allegedly as a result of the budget "sequester" that was due to start three days later.

Raising that issue doesn't mean that I believe, as some of the GOP faithful seem to imagine, that Obama has released a marauding criminal army on America. But the fact that the administration would take the melodramatic step of releasing people in federal detention even before the sequestration deadline because of a 2.3 percent cut in the federal budget shows that it is not really interested in avoiding the sequester or softening its effects. Apparently it would rather engage in the same kind of cheap political theater and serial exaggeration that the GOP has thus far specialized in. The White House knew that this would simply bait the Republicans' nativist wing at the same time as it soothed an important Democratic constituency. Obama tried to polarize the electorate over a culture-war issue when the ostensible topic was the federal budget. Where have we seen this tactic before?