A top national conservative magazine with a considerable and respectable past has increasingly gone the racist and now post-birther route, labeling President Barack Obama “queer” and proclaiming his “alienness.” The National Review, founded by conservative leader and author William F. Buckley, Jr. in 1955 — almost six decades ago — has as its cover, “Barack Obama’s Lawless Frontier,” and as its top feature story, “The Front Man — Face of the lawless bureaucracy,” by Kevin D. Williamson.
“Conservatives have for years attempted to put our finger upon precisely why Barack Obama strikes us as queer in precisely the way he does,” Williamson’s story begins. “There is an alienness about him, which in the fever swamps is expressed in all that ridiculous Kenyan-Muslim hokum, but his citizen-of-the-world shtick is strictly sophomore year — the great globalist does not even speak a foreign language. Obama has been called many things — radical, socialist — labels that may have him dead to rights at the phylum level but not down at his genus or species. His social circle includes an alarming number of authentic radicals, but the president’s politics are utterly conventional managerial liberalism. His manner is aloof, but he is too plainly a child of the middle class to succumb to the regal pretensions that the Kennedys suffered from, even if his household entourage does resemble the Ringling Bros. Circus as reimagined by Imelda Marcos when it moves about from Kailua Beach to Blue Heron Farm. Not a dictator under the red flag, not a would-be king, President Obama is nonetheless something new to the American experience, and troubling.”
Williamson, by the way, is the author of several books, including his latest, The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome: How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier, and More Secure, and The Dependency Agenda.
Regular readers know well the National Review. It’s home to NOM co-founder Maggie Gallagher. It’s home to Holocaust and Nazism defender Eliana Johnson. It’s home to Senior Editor Jay Nordlinger and his defense of the word “wetbacks.” And it used to be home to several racists, like John Derbyshire — also an admitted homophobe — who was excoriated for his racist screed, “The Talk: Nonblack Version.”
Welcome to the world of what passes for conservative intellectualism. It’s the Tea Party, only with bigger words that are spelled correctly.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated for clarity. The word “post-” was added to denote the birthers’ latest attacks on Obama.