‘Jedi Mind Meld’ Not Possible, Obama Says
President Obama said today that a “Jedi mind meld” is not possible to persuade intransigent Republicans to work with him to block the severe budget cuts required by the sequester.The Washington Post [WAPO] supplied a complete transcript of Obama’s speech and his responses to the questions he took at the press conference afterward.
As Obama has done on several occasions running up to the sequester, he hammered the Republicans hard, blaming them for the lack of a compromise. When a reporter challenged him for not locking everyone in a room and making them stay until an agreement could be reached, WAPO quoted him as saying:
“I am not a dictator. I’m the president. So, ultimately if Mitch McConnell or John Boehner say, ‘We need to go to catch a plane,’ I can’t have Secret Service block the doorway. Right?” Moments later, he added that he couldn’t perform a “Jedi mind meld.”
According to Brett LoGiurato at Business Insider, it was Jessica Yellin who asked the fateful question. According to LoGiurato, Twitter fans were “enraged” about President Obama’s passing comment. Whether they were truly outraged or just taking the opportunity to catch the most powerful man in the world in a mistake no dyed-in-the-wool SF nerd would make, the media certainly stood up to take notice.
Z. Byron Wolf, writing for ABC, called the statement a “sci fi faux pas.”
“There are Jedi mind tricks, of course, from Star Wars. And there is Vulcan Mind Meld, from Star Trek. But in equating the two, the president erred. He mixed Star Wars and Star Trek,” Wolf explained.
WAPO’s Emily Heil said, “President Obama might be urging cooperation between Democrats and Republicans on the sequester. But the only things that seems to be mixing at the moment are metaphors.”
But hold your horses. Could Obama actually be right about the existence of the “Jedi mind meld?”
Ease The Geek Rage: Obama’s Technically Right, There Is a Jedi Meld tcrn.ch/Z2P4y7 by @ferenstein
— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) March 1, 2013
According to Gregory Ferenstein at Tech Crunch, the Jedi mind meld does exist. Apparently, only the “super-geeky” knew that the technique, also known as a battle meld, is a rare and dangerous method for merging the minds of multiple warriors in the Star Wars universe.
Whew. I’m glad we got that settled. It might have spoiled my whole day if I thought President Obama couldn’t perform a Jedi mind meld that doesn’t even exist…oh. Wait a minute.
