John Derbyshire is a Blithering Idiot

Please stand by for one of the most racist and ugly things you're going to see this week--courtesy of our friends at the National Review Online. The link might be broken soon--I can't see them keeping this column up for very long. John Derbyshire decided one day to try to write about race, Barack Obama, and America. All I can say is, wow. Somewhere, a lonely village is missing its Derbyshire.

He’s black, and so is God. Working in combination with other factors that I’ll get to, Obama’s négritude will help him with a lot of politically vague types who are neither black nor distinctively liberal, but who have been oriented the Obama way by decades of watching Numinous Negro types saving the world, or defying it with a supernatural level of dignity and gravitas, in the movies and on TV: characters played by Will Smith, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Michael Clarke Duncan, Denzel Washington, and of course the numinousest of them all, Morgan Freeman. There is probably now an entire demographic cohort of young Americans whose mental image of God is Morgan Freeman.

[SNIP]

He’s black, in an exotic way. This can’t be underestimated. If the candidate was George Obama, or Barack Washington, he would be twice as acceptable to the voting public. Cast your eye back down the list of U.S. presidents. “Exotic” is surely one of the last words they bring to mind, even a tad behind “black.” (There is, after all, an excellent chance that on the one-drop rule, Barack Obama will not be our first black president.) Our country has always had a scattering of high-achieving exotics, but none of them ever got close to the White House. In their presidential preferences, Americans of all parties are conservative. Other things being equal, we prefer boring white guys.

Obama’s East African origins don’t help. Most black Americans take their African descent from West Africa. The distribution of physical types in East Africa is considerably different. (As we shall no doubt see in the upcoming summer Olympics, where runners of West African ancestry will take all the sprinting awards, while East Africans will sweep the long-distance events.) There is of course a lot of overlap, but enough difference in physical types to give Obama a tinge of strangeness. The minds of many nonblack voters — and perhaps some black ones, too — will contain, at some level well below the surface, a thought like: He’s a black guy, but is he one of OUR black guys?

It's okay--my jaw hit the floor, too. It's alright--I'm as mad as you are. And it's fine--you can stick your head out the window and scream obscenities--I understand.

Please bear in mind--this was written and published in the National Review Online. Yes, it's a real publication and website. It really is. And Derbyshire was paid money to write that. YES! It's true. Can you think of anything--anything--that is stupider than what I just quoted to you? Anything?

John Derbyshire--vehemently challenging Douglas Feith for the title of "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the Earth."

--WS