This week’s honoree is originally from New Orleans and we even have a few mutual friends; one of whom assured me a few years ago that Quin Hillyer was a “rational” conservative. After spending some time immersed in his oeuvre, I beg to differ, and that is why The Not So Mighty Quin Hillyer is malaka of the week.

Hillyer is something of an itinerant right wing pundit: he writes for the Georges Advocate, American Spectator and, most notably for our purposes, the National Review. The day before Bibipalooza, Hillyer declared his fealty to Bibi in a bizarre piece for the NRO:

In thanking America, Netanyahu was not posturing for political advantage. Netanyahu — who spent far more of his formative years on the American mainland than Obama did, and who took enemy fire at the age when Obama was openly pushing Marxist theory, and who learned and practiced free enterprise at the same age when Obama was practicing and teaching Alinskyism — has spoken eloquently for decades in praise of the Western heritage of freedom and human rights. He also speaks and acts, quite obviously, to preserve security — for Israel, of course, but more broadly for the civilized world. On Tuesday, as he has done for more than 30 years, Netanyahu will talk about the threat to humanity posed by Iran.

There was much more of this nonsense in Hillyer’s ode to Bibi, but thatparagraph will suffice as an example of his skewed thinking. There’s so much to dissect but one of my favorite bits is where he implies than Bibi doesn’t posture for political advantage. Say what? His entire appearance in the House Chamber was a campaign rally aimed at the folks back home. That’s why so many of us found the whole enterprise so objectionable: Speaker Boner was openly taking sides in the upcoming Israeli election. It’s not unprecedented for our guvmint to take sides in foreign elections but it’s rarely down so overtly and obnoxiously. But subtlety is not the strong suit of this Congress. Boner is repaying Bibi for being pro-Mitt in 2012 and Bibi is getting a bit of payback for the time President Clinton subtly and slyly favored Shimon Peres and Labor in the 1996 general election. Speaker Boner, however, does not do sly and neither does Bibi. Besides, Netanyahu and Likud won that election. I hope this year’s more overt intervention backfires as well.

In addition to his desire to sub-contract American foreign policy to the Likud led Israeli coalition government, Hillyer implies that Bibi is a better Merican than Barack. Let’s recap the malakatude:

Netanyahu — who spent far more of his formative years on the American mainland than Obama did, and who took enemy fire at the age when Obama was openly pushing Marxist theory, and who learned and practiced free enterprise at the same age when Obama was practicing and teaching Alinskyism…

Hawaii is a part of the so called American “homeland.” An attack on it triggered World War II; one would think that Malaka Hillyer and other conservatives would know this.  Bibi’s time as a student, businessman,  and undiplomatic diplomat in the US and A, does not make him more of an American than POTUS. This is boilerplate right wing bigotry circa 2015. It’s birtherism by another name.

The people I have in common with Hillyer have assured me that he’s neither a racist nor a wingnut. That may be true socially, but his recent writings don’t support that. The Not So Mighty Quin seems to be another one of those conservatives who freaked out after 9/11 and went completely batshit crazy upon the election of our first African-American President. It’s not an uncommon story, I’ve lost some friends to Islamophobic Obama Derangement Syndrome and it seems to be Hillyer’s story as well.  And that is why Quin Hillyer is malaka of the week.