President Barack Obama may be President of the United States of America but he looks for all the world like the stereotype we have of aliens from movies. Most of them are long and wiry with outsized heads and beautiful skin. They have longs arms and long legs and long fingers and a thin torso.

Aliens, like Obama, are invariably tall, remote, distant, and very smart. Like the President, they seem to spend an ungodly amount of time thinking things through. How weird is that?

The President of the United States of America, according to Dorothy Rabinovitz of the Wall Street Journal in a piece about terrorism, is “The Alien” because of his “ideological core.”

Now Rabinovitz is one of my top-five journalists of all time, so what follows does not emanate from anything but admiration for her. She is thoughtful, precise, peace-loving, thought-provoking—and dead wrong because she mis-reads “ideological core” as the root cause of Obamanation’s Alienation.

“Those qualities to be expected in a president were never about rhetoric,” Rabinowitz writes. “Mr. Obama had proved himself a dab hand at that on the campaign trail. They were a matter of identification with the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there and not only on the Fourth of July.

“A great part of America now understands that this president’s sense of identification lies elsewhere,” she continues, “and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.”

Next to these paragraphs in the Journal on the web was an innocuous caption: “WSJ Asia editorial writer Hugo Restall reports on the President’s travel plans.” But the caption illustrated a video with a first frame that looked for all the world like one of those black jockey statues that used to sit on Southern (and some Northern) lawns. In fact, watch the WSJ Opinion Journal piece and it turns out the statue is one of Obama as a boy in Indonesia: the President cancelled a trip there in order to focus on the spill-baby-spill problems in the Gulf. There was then talk from a Journal commentator on the same video of what might happen if they tried to raise that statue of Obama as a boy “up on the [Washington] Mall.”

To many Americans, including thousands of those in the Tea Party, Barack Obama really is an alien—but it’s for racial, not ideological reasons. And it’s impossible not the see the birther movement in toto as at least partially racial in motivation. We have a President who could not possibly be the President of the country they love.

Think of it this way: if Little Black Barack wasn’t born in Hawaii, then he was born in… Kenya. To the “demented fringe,” that makes him an African without any hyphen required. And that also makes him an Alien to our way of life, though not for the ideological reasons Rabinowitz suggests.

Beyond the ideological, it is impossible not to see Rabinovitz’s “Alien” depiction of Obama—and the video frame of Little Black Barack—as anything but a veiled reference, however inadvertent, to race. Both half-black and half-white, Obama landed on the national stage of the 2004 Democratic Convention as a State Senator speaking of a country of a different color entirely—not “blue” states and “red” states, but “the United States of America.” As a Democratic Presidential candidate in 2008, his speech on race—and on his radical Pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright—made color a defining characteristic of his campaign. His speeches echoing the rhythms and the words of the Reverend. Martin Luther King Jr. guarantee the same connection to the inequities of the past.

As the first African-American President, allusions to Obama’s race by the opposition have been both unavoidable and constant. He has appeared in whiteface in official Republican National Committee (RNC) presentations. He has been depicted as an animal, a Hitler, a Stalin—and a Socialist.

One other thing. Barack Obama loves basketball and will play the game as long as his body allows it. If you watched him play, you’d never say there’s anything weird or strange or alien about him. And you would have to say he’s got game.