It's a Conference About Nothing

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Sure, the White Houses bills it as the conference on “Preventing on Violent Extremists,” but really it’s the Seinfeld Conference — a conference about nothing. (NBC should love it –ed.)

If you were to use the Socratic Method to prove my point, the conversation between you and President Obama would go something like this.

YOU: I know it’s important to prevent violent extremism, so what is it that makes these people extremists?

OBAMA: What people?

YOU: The Muslim people committing the violence.

OBAMA: They aren’t really Muslim. And they aren’t the only ones committing violence. Take the Crusades, for example…

YOU: Can we talk about the Crusades another time? They were bad and all, but right now the big problem is in the Middle East. So what is it that makes the violent people there so extreme?

OBAMA: Jobs. They don’t have jobs.

YOU: Why don’t they have jobs?

OBAMA: Their infrastructure is a shambles.

YOU: What happened to the infrastructure?

OBAMA: Their economies lag behind considerably.

YOU: Now maybe we’re getting somewhere! What’s wrong with their economies?

OBAMA: Jobs.

And on and on it goes, like the Seinfeld gang looking for Kramer’s car in a parking garage — and when they do find it, the car won’t start.

Why the focus on jobs? We can’t get an honest explanation from the administration, just more of the round-robin logic always coming back to jobs. There’s just this big black hole in their thinking, into which “Islamic fundamentalism” was dropped years ago, and it can never escape.

The most charitable explanation I can come up with is that Obama sincerely believes that the syncretic, laid-back, beach-combing, borderline polytheistic Islam he knew as a kid in Indonesia is the “real” Islam, and that all those mullahs and emirs and caliphs back in Islam’s Arab birthplace are doing it all wrong.

There are less charitable explanations, which along with the one above can be grouped into four broad categories:

1) Fundamentalist Islam isn’t the “real” Islam Obama knew as a boy.

2) It’s all Valerie Jarrett’s doing.

3) Obama is proving rhetorical cover for the fundamentalists who rule Iran, in pursuit of either a formal alliance or at least an entente cordiale with Tehran’s mullahs.

4) He’s a secret Muslim plotting to destroy America.

The truth is probably some combination of elements of 1, 2, and 3 — although if someone came up with irrefutable proof of 4, I wouldn’t exactly need to lie down on my fainting couch.

Whatever Obama’s real motives, he must keep pushing this notion of “Jobs!” for two reasons. One, he needs something to cover up his real motive, and two, “Jobs!” is exactly the sort of Marxian bullshit determinism Obama’s progressive lefty base craves to hear.

On second thought, maybe this is really the Reservoir Dogs conference. The opening diner sequence in Quentin Tarantino’s first movie includes a funny — if a bit rough — conversation about the real meaning of Madonna’s “Like A Virgin.” My more tender readers will want to skip this next bit, quoted from the movie:

Mr. Brown: What the fuck was I talking about?

Mr. Pink: You said ‘True Blue’ was about a nice girl, a sensitive girl who meets a nice guy, and that ‘Like a Virgin’ was a metaphor for big dicks.

Mr. Brown: Lemme tell you what ‘Like a Virgin’ is about. It’s all about this cooze who’s a regular fuck machine, I’m talking morning, day, night, afternoon, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick.

Mr. Blue: How many dicks is that?

Mr. White: A lot.

Mr. Brown: Then one day she meets this John Holmes motherfucker and it’s like, whoa baby, I mean this cat is like Charles Bronson in the ‘Great Escape’, he’s digging tunnels. Now, she’s gettin’ the serious dick action and she’s feeling something she ain’t felt since forever. Pain. Pain.

Mr. Brown: It hurts her. It shouldn’t hurt her, you know, her pussy should be Bubble Yum by now, but when this cat fucks her it hurts. It hurts just like it did the first time. You see the pain is reminding a fuck machine what it once was like to be a virgin. Hence, ‘Like a Virgin’.

Now the story goes that Tarantino got to meet Madonna shortly after the movie came out, and asked her to autograph one of her albums for him. And Madonna took the pen and the album and wrote, “Dear Quentin, It’s not about dicks.”

If only we had someone with Madonna’s (former) star power in a position to say, “Dear Barack, It’s not about jobs.”