Let's be honest: The text here is really just an excuse to run the pictures

Over the past few years a number of reporters and editors have referred to President Obama as a "Vulcan." This May 26, 2009 editorial from the Chicago Tribune is representative:

After an interview in which President Barack Obama confronted the economy, the Middle East and a lot of other Vital Issues, a Newsweek correspondent actually elicited an important new piece of information about the president.

He's Spock. As in Star Trek's famous Vulcan with the pointy ears and the computer-like brain.

The reference, I believe, is to a May 2009 Newsweek article, "We're All Trekkies Now."

And a June 20, 2010 editorial in the San Antonio Express News recounted:

The first well-known reference to Obama as a Vulcan came in a June 2008 NPR interview with Henry Jenkins, then a professor of humanities at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "There's something in the mythology that surrounds Barack Obama that seems, to me, echoes some of our assumptions about Spock," Jenkins said. "He's someone who's been able to bridge worlds."

This fascinating commentary chugged along on impulse power until March 2009, when New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd gave it warp speed. "Mr. Obama has a bit of Mr. Spock in him (and not just the funny ears)," she wrote. "He has a Vulcan-like logic and detachment."

And the Vulcan rumors did not appear only in newspapers or magazines. Silly pictures, like the one at the top of this post, started appearing on the Internet. For awhile there I would not have been surprised if a survey had shown that, just as some ridiculous number of Tea Partiers thought Mr. Obama to be a Muslim, an equivalent percentage of young men living in their parents' basements thought him an alien. Really, really alien.

But 2012 is upon us and Mr. Obama is intent on securing another four year lease at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. And, clearly, the President and his advisers believe it's time to put those troubling rumors to rest, once and for all.

Thus it was on February 29 that Mr. Obama met with Nichelle Nichols in the Oval Office and posed for this picture, now appearing everywhere on-line (this copy obtained from the Huffington Post):

How does posing with Lt. Uhura prove that the President is not a Vulcan?

Ask any Trekker: Can't you see he's smiling?