Sweet Reagan’s nutsack, the cold chilled her to the bone. The snow beat against the windows of her aerie high above the deserted Manhattan streets, themselves devoid of people, filled only with great drifts of snow. She had sent her houseboy Manuel off into a howling storm to fetch more cocktail olives weeks ago and he had never returned. Perhaps, snow-blind and lost in the storm, he had wandered onto the frozen East River and fallen through the ice, or been buried under a pile of snow tossed aside by a plow, where he would stay until everything thawed and melted in the spring.

Desperate for something to occupy her mind and distract from the gnawing hunger inside that could only be filled by three perfect olives speared on a plastic sword and then daintily plucked off one at a time by her ancient teeth, Sister Peggy Noonan of the Order of the Ketamine Void had stolen her Jewish neighbor’s copy of The Atlantic. She quickly found herself engrossed in a long examination of those terrible ISIS brutes in the Middle East. Now she was shivering, and not because of the cold. No, she trembled because these murderous fanatics were plotting against America, could in fact already be here, in this great city, ready to strike. Maybe they had brought on this terrible winter to make the citizens miserable.

She shook her head. Primitive Middle Eastern theocracies rarely have their own weather machines. And if they did, the darkish knave in the White House would probably drone on in his boring way about the need to understand their motives.

In sorry contrast, of course, are the Obama administration’s willful delusions and dodges. They reached their height this week when State Department spokesman Marie Harf talked on MSNBC of the “root causes” that drive jihadists, such as “lack of opportunity for jobs.” […]

It isn’t about getting a job. They have a job: waging jihad.

Such fools in this administration, suggesting that economic and perhaps spiritual poverty might drive people to embrace an ideology, even one as violent and nihilistic as that of ISIS, that promised salvation and uplift. When had that ever happened in the history of human civilization?

The president famously cannot even name the ISIS threat forthrightly, and that is a criticism not of semantics but of his thinking … At the “violent extremism” summit this week he emphasized Islamic “legitimate grievances” and lectured America on the need for tolerance toward American Muslims.

Why, Obama was as bad as Bill Clinton, who had always felt everyone’s pain! How could Obama say murderous Islamists have “legitimate grievances?” Unless … he had actually been making the point that allowing citizens of countries to air “legitimate grievances” through the democratic process was the way to counter extremism, that allowing people to participate in the body politic and have agency over their own lives would make joining violent revolutionaries like ISIS a much less attractive option to the disaffected of both dictatorships and oligarch-controlled democracies alike.

Was that possible? Oh, if only there was some tool that would allow her to quickly pull up the op-ed in which the president used the words “legitimate grievances” and read them in context!

“When peaceful democratic change is impossible, it feeds into the terrorist propaganda that violence is the only available answer.” Yes, sure. But the young men and women ISIS recruits from Western nations already live in peaceful democracies.

Okay, scratch that. Maybe she was determined to not understand the president’s words even if they bit her on the ass.

[WSJ]