For several reasons, I found this post on National Review to be completely ironic and hilarious:
Congratulations to Captain Picard! [Mike Potemra]
Palace sources say Patrick Stewart is about to be knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. It turns out he is an avid supporter of Britain’s Labour party; his support must be especially welcome in this, one of Labour’s darker hours. Coincidentally, I have over the past couple of months been watching DVDs of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show I missed completely in its run of 1987 to 1994; and I confess myself amazed that so many conservatives are fond of it. Its messages are unabashedly liberal ones of the early post-Cold War era – peace, tolerance, due process, progress (as opposed to skepticism about human perfectibility). I asked an NR colleague about it, and he speculated that the show’s appeal for conservatives lay largely in the toughness of the main character: Jean-Luc Picard was a moral hardass where the Captain Kirk of the earlier show was more of an easygoing, cheerful swashbuckler. I think there’s something to that: Patrick Stewart did indeed create, in that character, a believable and compelling portrait of ethical uprightness.
You know something is amiss in conservativeland when supporting “peace, tolerance, due process, and progress” are denigrated as “unabashedly liberal”. And if they think Captain Picard is a “portrait of ethical uprightness” they must not have watched “Captain’s Holiday“.
Perhaps, as one commenter claims, the NRO are advance agents for the Borg. Resistance is futile. But a better explanation is that the NRO want to think they are the Q (who also tried to make a universal example of Picard, in the first episode). Although the episode they really need to watch is “The Drumhead“.
